The Porters’ Rest
Ever spot this curiosity hiding in plain sight on Piccadilly?
Published in the Londonist, 16 February 2021
On Piccadilly, on the edge of Green Park just opposite the Cavalry and Guards Club, stands what appears to be a thin, rectangular table, supported by two rectangular columns.
It’s the sort of table on which, on a warm summer’s evening, you might rest a martini while admiring the sun go down in between the Wellington Arch and Apsley House.
As you approach the table, you realise that it is a little higher than your average bar counter. On a long bronze plaque is the inscription:
“At the suggestion of R A Slaney Esq who for 20 years represented Shrewsbury in Parliament, this porters 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.”
Until the mid-19th century, porters’ rests such as this were typically to be found outside inns. Before the development of Belgravia and Knightsbridge, this end of Piccadilly was on the western edge of London and there were numerous staging inns serving as transport hubs where passengers and goods would arrive and leave in stagecoaches, providing work for local porters.
These inns had similar porters’ benches outside with “boards” for depositing their loads. (Porters’ benches are also found in parts of India – they tend to be made of stone.)
At that time, one would rent a porter as one might now order a courier bike or hire a man with a van. There were badge-wearing “Ticket Porters” and “Fellowship Porters” (who carried “measurable” goods – salt, coal etc). Both were licensed by the City of London (examples of their badges can be found at the Museum of London).
William Darton illustrates the two sorts of porter in his “City Scenes” of 1828 and a similar rest is clearly visible.
Porters needed energy and so drank quantities of beer and this gave rise to a brew called “Porter”. Beer Street by William Hogarth shows a Ticket Porter outside an inn refreshing himself from a generous tankard.
An example of this occupation still exists in Smithfield Market, where licensed meat porters are known as “bummarees” (and their act of carrying a large piece of meat is, somewhat surprisingly, technically known as “humping”). They wear long white coats, beautifully besmirched with blood to look like abstract expressionist canvases, and hump colossal carcasses on their backs.
These bummarees – and the rather expensive luggage porters at Heathrow – are the last vestiges of this profession which employed several thousand in the 17th-19th centuries.
But Piccadilly’s porters’ rest is not all it seems. It is in fact a reproduction of the original Grade II rest, which (somehow) went missing.
In 2016, following pressure by Peter Benthoud, a local guide, the replacement was unveiled by Cllr Robert and Simon Kenyan Slaney (the great-grandson of RA Slaney MP, a Whig politician remembered for his efforts to educate and improve the conditions of the poor).
The reproduction appears to be faithful to the original – even down to the missing apostrophe after “Porters”.