On 1 February 1860 John and his sister Alice arrived in London at the house of their cousin Jane Hirst.
Jane had married Charles Stewart Stubbs (her second cousin once removed) and was known in the family, to distinguish her from the many other Jane Stubbs, as "Mrs Charles". A tragic accident left her widowed in 1848, only four years after her marriage. Charles's death in a riding accident in the Park left Jane at the age of twenty-four with their two very young children and pregnant with the third. She remained in London near her husband's family and must have had the financial benefit of her marriage settlement and the support of her father and her father-in-law.
In February 1860 she was aged thirty-six and lived with her son and two daughters in
Islington at 15
Cloudesley Square.
Islington was on the cusp of change. Cloudesley Square was some thirty years old, in an area of pleasant terraces laid out with gardens in open countryside from 1825 onward, with the Holy Trinity Church designed by the young Charles Barry. The rural quality of Islington began to disappear from the middle of the century, when it became rapidly built up. A fashionable shopping "bazaar" had been built on the High Street in 1850, and in 1860 the Grand Theatre or
Philharmonic Hall was under construction, while the open land remaining at Stoke Newington was soon to be built over.
London was already beginning to undergo the vast changes that would create a modern city. Huge trenches were being dug to house the new underground railway and the Houses of Parliament, destroyed by fire a few years before John was born, had been rebuilt. After the Great Stink of 1858, plans were afoot to create the sewerage system that would rescue the city from stench and disease, but it would be ten years before the opening of the Albert and Victoria Embankments began to create the riverside panorama that we know today.
Alice, aged fifteen, was on her way to school in Blackheath – accessible by train from London, growing rapidly and with many schools, it was an ideal place for her and her cousin Polly Redmayne to complete their education and broaden their experience.
John was twenty-one and after his years in Uncle Hirst's office was in London to complete his law studies and take the examination which would qualify him as a solicitor. He would be in London for the next four months, so Mrs Charles helped him to find lodgings with a Mrs Pirmiger at 23 Upper Islington Terrace, just north of present-day Cross Street.
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