The A-Z of Curious London by Gilly Pickup

Author:Gilly Pickup
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752493992
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

MRS SALMON’S WAXWORK SHOP

London has offered every kind of entertainment imaginable to paying customers throughout its history. Oddities and curiosities of every kind were on commercial display, from hermaphrodites and dwarves to acrobatic monkeys and animals who could do arithmetic and tell fortunes. Hand-to-hand combat, puppet shows, conjurers, strange inventions and quack doctors were all popular amusements. If the real thing was not available, there were always waxworks offered as a substitute. Mrs Salmon’s Fleet Street exhibition of historical tableaux and horrific scenes in wax lasted for more than a century.

The shop can be found by walking up Inner Temple Lane to the gatehouse at its northern end, one of the few survivors of the Great Fire of London. For a while, part of the building was a tavern called the Hand Inn. Later, it was renamed the Prince’s Arms, perhaps in honour of James I’s short-lived son, Henry, Prince of Wales (1594–1612). The elegantly panelled main room on the first floor had a fine Jacobean plaster ceiling with the Prince of Wales’ feathers in the centre and the letters ‘PH’, for Prince Henry. It was thought that the house was originally built for the Council of the Duchy of Cornwall and that Prince Henry used the room on the first floor after he became Prince of Wales in 1610.

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