St Clement Danes (parish)

Governance

It was first recorded in 1190, being as such a relatively ancient parish; about half was in the Liberty of Westminster and half in the Ossulstone hundred of Middlesex until its final forms when other parishes had been created absorbing parts of its earlier area. The medieval parish lay partly in the vill of Westminster, being one of four parishes of Westminster, and partly in the soke of Leicester a city in the English Midlands. The Ossulstone section formed part of the Liberty of the Duchy of Lancaster. The parish was included in the returns of the Bills of mortality from 1604.

In 1826 the stocks belonging to the parish, situated in Portugal Street were removed and destroyed. They were thought to be the last remaining in London.

The parish was grouped into the Strand District in 1855 when it came within the area of responsibility of the Metropolitan Board of Works. In 1889 the parish became part of the County of London and in 1900 it became part of the Metropolitan Borough of Westminster. It was abolished as a civil parish in 1922.

Hospital

King's College Hospital was originally opened in 1840 in the disused St Clement Danes parish workhouse in Portugal Street, as a training facility where medical students of King's College London could practice and receive instruction from the college's own professors. Booth's poverty map shows a generation later remnant streets of the intense poverty which formed much of the parish of the 1840s — overcrowded tenements characterised by poverty and disease and the hospital was treating annually 1,290 inpatients in 120 beds, with two patients sharing a bed by no means unusual. The hospital later moved to its present site in Denmark Hill.

Geography

The parish consisted of two areas extending into the left (north) half of the Thames.

The main part formed the east part of Westminster vill which was largely gardens and rural until the late medieval period. It adjoined the Liberty of the Rolls and the Temple area of the City of London. To the west it had a straight boundary with two parishes of contrasting size: St Martin in the Fields (large) and St Mary le Strand (very small). To the north it was bounded by St Giles in the Fields.

The western detached part was very small; it lay between an arm of St Martin in the Fields by the river and the few-acres Precinct of the Savoy of similar size to St Mary le Strand also by the river.

Demography

Ecclesiastical successor

The boundaries are the same in the Church of England as the final form of the civil parish save that St Mary le Strand is combined; it has a third place of worship, King's College Chapel, London. The two churches are known as the "island churches" forming traffic islands.