A Unique Historical Street Oddity On Piccadilly

Walk along Piccadilly by Green Park, and, by a bus stop, you will find an unusual piece of street furniture.

It is known as a ‘porter’s rest’ and is the only one left in London.

What Is A Porter?

Porters were those hired to carry goods from A to B and from the 17th-19th centuries, the trade employed thousands in the city.

Professional porters were licensed by the City of London and were given a pewter badge.

There were two types of porter, firstly, ‘fellowship porters’, who mainly operated around the docks and carried measurable goods such as coal and salt.

The other kind were ‘ticket porters’ who carried any odd bits and bobs not covered by the fellowship porters, such as luggage, parcels or merchant’s chests.

Porter’s Rests

Being a porter must have been an exhausting job and these rests, with their wide flat benches, were placed around the city streets to support their cargo and give them a moment’s respite. They would have been placed on major thoroughfares, particularly outside inns.

The rest would also have been roughly at chest height, meaning that they did not have to pick their heavy goods up from the floor.

Until the mid-19th century this area of Piccadilly was right at the edge of the city so therefore would have been a hub for porters. There would have been lots of staging inns where goods and luggage were deposited for porters to take on into the city.

The Rest Is History

That brings us to the porter’s rest that still remains on Piccadilly. You will notice it has a plaque on it that reads:

“At The Suggestion of R.A. Slaney Esq. Who For 20 Years Represented Shrewsbury In Parliament, This Porter’s Rest Was Erected In 1861 By The Vestry Of St. George Hanover Square For The Benefit Of Porters And Others Carrying Burdens. As a relic of a past period in London’s history, it is hoped that the people will aid its preservation.”

1861 would have been well past the zenith for porters. By the second half of the 19th century, the porter trade was in decline with the introduction of the penny post in 1840 and the arrival of the railways.

ArREST that man!

That is not the end of the story however. The one we have today is sadly not the Grade II listed original. The original mysteriously disappeared in around 2014 and no-one, to this day, knows where it went.

There had been a planning application in place in 2013 to have it removed because of an ‘internal complaint’ about it being a ‘general nuisance’. The complaint had been marked ‘pending consideration’ by Westminster Council.

When asked whether they had removed it, Westminster Council said that it must have been stolen.

It was a local tour guide Peter Berthound, who had spotted that it had gone missing. Peter spearheaded a campaign to petition the council to have it replaced.

The new replica porter’s rest was unveiled on 16th May 2016 by Simon Kenyon-Slaney, who was fittingly the great-great grandson of R.A. Slaney, the MP who had pushed for the installation of the original, and Robert Davis, deputy leader of Westminster City Council.

Click here for the news article covering the unveiling.

Simon said “it is one of those little details that people really like. It’s some kind of continuity with the past.”

I could not agree more Simon! It is so important we look after these little pieces of history, however insignifcant and humble they may seem at first glance.

More quirky London spots below!