London Stone, Wealdstone, Whetstone, Leytonstone… our city’s geography is intimately linked with ancient lumps of rock, some of which can still be seen. But one of the most important of all, Oswald’s Stone, is almost totally forgotten. Where was it? And what happened to it?
That’s for the main feature. First a quick note:
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The Lost Stones of London
Hands up who’s been to Ossulstone. No? No one? Well I bet you have, even if the name means nothing. You might even have lived there, in complete and utter ignorance of the word Ossulstone. I did. For ten years.
Ossulstone was, from time immemorial, one of the subdivisions of Middlesex. It was a ‘Hundred’, which is to say an administrative area somewhere in size between a parish and a county. Ossulstone covered most of what we now consider as Inner North London (and bits of Outer London). The chief exception was the City of London which, then as now, likes to say “I’ll do my own thing, thank you” whenever someone tries to usher it into their plans.
The upshot: if you live in Finchley, Ealing, Hampstead, Highgate, Stepney, Poplar, Chelsea or more-or-less anywhere in north London, then you’re an Ossulstonian. Here, I drew you a handy map:
Ossulstone Hundred had its origins in the Anglo-Saxon period and lasted well into the Victorian era. In other words, Ossulstone was “a thing” for the vast majority of London’s recorded history. It’s only in recent times that we’ve all forgotten it ever existed.
As an area of local government, Ossulstone looked after many functions including (at various times) taxation, meting out justice and gathering the citizenry together for military service. I could spend another 4,000 words describing its history and purpose, but where’s the fun in that? Instead, let’s delve into the trivial. The name; the etymology; the suffix. What was the stone of Ossulstone?
A heap of stones
London once had many stones. They made convenient landmarks for gatherings and councils, or else marked boundaries or distances. As a result, they often crop up in place names.
Brixton is first recorded in 1062 as Brixiges Stan, suggesting the town was named for a stone (stan) of importance to a local lord called something like Brixi. It has long vanished. Leytonstone also references an ancient stone, which can still be found if you seek out the High Stone at the southern tip of Leyton flats. (Which I have, of course, done.)
Ossulstone, too, had its hunk of rock, popularly known as Oswald’s Stone (sometimes Oswulf’s Stone). I marked it in red on the map above, between Marylebone and Paddington. This stone is particularly interesting not only because it was the focus and namesake for the largest administrative area in the medieval London region, but also because someone may have nabbed it.
Between a rock and a hard place
The road junction we now call Marble Arch has a long and gruesome history. Most readers will be aware that this was the home of the Tyburn gallows, London’s chief place of execution for hundreds of years. But the site was important a millennium before the gallows were in full swing, thanks to a junction of Roman roads (today Edgware Road and Oxford Street).
Here, too, was Oswald’s Stone. The rock’s origins are unknown, though it’s commonly supposed to have been a Roman milestone. It may even have been here before the Romans came, as a site of importance to the earlier Britons, though we shall probably never know. At some point, an Anglo-Saxon leader called something like Oswald decided that it would make a handsome centrepiece around which to hold a moot, and it soon became the traditional place of council for the wider area. (Again, speculation, but it seems a likely chain of events.)
The stone then pops up in documents throughout history. It is first referenced in the Domesday Book of 1086 where it’s written as Osulvestane. The exact location is a little mysterious. A site beside the Tyburn gallows is usually assumed, but at least one source suggests it may have been farther south-east, within what is now Mayfair. The most suggestive evidence comes from the John Rocque map of 1746, which clearly shows a milestone close to the present site of Marble Arch. Another mark, indicating a stone ‘where soldiers are shot’ might also be a candidate.
By the 19th century, the gallows had gone, and local councils had long-since found better places to hang out. The old lump of rock had no purpose and was largely forgotten. It barely gets a mention in books and newspaper accounts hereafter.
One exception was published in 1869 by the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society. This tells us that the authorities turfed it over in 1819, only to dig it up again three years later. It lingered on for a few more decades, and was last spotted leaning against the Marble Arch1. Immediately following this account, the stone seems to have disappeared. Cause and effect has been suggested — that some peculiar species of thief carted the stone away, having read of its importance in the journal.
Another antiquarian, giving only his initials of JGG, described an attempt to track the stone down in 1882. He (I presume) made enquiries of the gatekeeper at Marble Arch, who told him “It has been sent to the yard, out of the way,” but knew nothing more about it. Other than that, the trail is utterly cold. Whether it was taken to a local yard for recycling or stolen by second-rate artefact hunters remains a mystery.
I’d like to imagine that Oswald’s Stone still exists somewhere. Perhaps there’s a reader out there, with a family legend about an old rock in a back garden; an old rock which once stood by the Tyburn gallows. The comments section is open…
The administrative area of Ossulstone ceased to exist in 1894, along with all the other ancient Hundreds2. Today, I’d be surprised if one percent of its residents have ever heard of it. The rate may be higher, I suppose, on Ossultson Street alongside the British Library, which is named after the defunct area.
Even Middlesex itself has largely disappeared. For most purposes, it ceased to exist in 1965, yet it lives on nostalgically as an ‘historic county’ for those who like cricket and wistful address writing.
A few other London stones
We’ve already encountered the Leytonstone and the Brix-stone, but many others lithic landmarks can or could be found around the city. The most famous is surely London Stone, an enigmatic lump of rock that has stood on Cannon Street since at least medieval times. Nobody knows why it is there — perhaps it was another Roman milestone — but it was clearly important to our ancestors, judging by the number of records in which it is mentioned (including a Shakespeare play). According to legend, if London Stone is ever removed, then the City itself shall fall3.
Other stones survive here and there. The Harrow centre of Wealdstone retains its weald stone, a turd-brown lump outside the Bombay Central restaurant on the High Road. I imagine it goes largely unnoticed, save for the occasional attentions of a passing preschooler, urinating dog or overkeen Substack writer.
The tube station of Totteridge and Whetstone lies downhill of its eponymous whetstone, another disregarded lump in front of the Griffin pub. This one at least carries an information panel. It’s something of a charlatan, though, for this rock was probably a mounting block rather than a stone that gave the area its name (which is more likely derived from west-town). Incidentally, Whetstone was the northern-most settlement in the Ossulstone Hundred.
Haggerston and Keston are two other London place names that may remember an ancient stone, although other derivations are possible. Usually, places with this ending can be attributed to a ‘-tun’ (small settlement or farmstead) rather than a ‘-stan’ (stone). Kensington, Kingston4, Edmonton, Dalston, Kenton and many others come from the -tun derivation.
Curiously, one old marker connected with Tyburn does still exist. If you were to walk into the London Metropole Hotel, a 10-minute hike north of Marble Arch, then you would brush past the ‘Tyburn Stone’, just inside the entrance:
Its history is reasonably well documented and, alas, it’s unlikely to be our missing Ossulstone. Rather, it was placed a half mile from Tyburn at some point in the 18th century, to alert travellers that the junction was approaching (a toll gate had replaced the gallows by this point). It’s moved around a bit, and disappeared for a while, but now stands reasonably close to its original location.
Out with the old, in with the older
Stones have mostly lost their emblematic function in the modern age. We no longer hold councils around stones, and we muster our citizenry at rock concerts rather than rock landmarks. Yet these solid, permanent objects still fire the municipal imagination.
Croydon, for example, gained 20 new rocks in 2015 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Borough’s formation (into 20 wards). Bromley, too, has a cohort of stones, imported from Scotland in 2000 to celebrate the millennium. These rocks, samples of Lewisian Gneiss, are two billion years old, far more ancient than any indigenous rock — older even than multicellular life. Even so, I’d happily trade a dozen precambrian wonders for the safe return of Oswald’s Stone.
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These last two sentences are usually stated as fact, though they rest on only the one source, so far as I can see. The account was written by the antiquarian William Henry Black, who spends most of the paper speculating about geometrical connections between London’s ancient sites. His methods have the whiff of crankery about them, and his conclusions are dubious, so I’m inclined to be cautious with his testimony.
A few echoes remain. A ‘Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds’ still exists as a ludicrous means of escaping the House of Commons. MPs cannot technically resign from the House; instead, they have to be appointed to a position that disqualifies them. Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds is one such position, which carries no meaningful responsibilities. Recent incumbents Boris Johnson and Nadine Dorries were ideally suited.
To allow building works, the stone was removed to the Museum of London in May 2016. The City did not crumble. However, as I think I was the first to point out, the move came just weeks before the Brexit referendum, which would ultimately knock billions off London’s economy. Thank goodness the stone was eventually returned to Cannon Street!
That said, Kingston does have its own famous stone, upon which four or five Anglo-Saxon kings were crowned.
I love all the uncommon sites and objects you write about! I suppose these are too far apart to have a Stone Walk for a point to point wander?
Oooh excellent. Have ordered!