Why do certain locations acquire sudden popularity as places to do away with yourself? The phenomenon is not new; ‘certain
spots in London have become popular with suicides,’ observed Walter Thornbury
in 1878, ‘yet apparently without any special reason, except that even suicides
are vain and like to die with éclat.’ The judgement seems a little harsh, and
‘éclat’ seems a strange word to describe the attitude of desperate people who
take their own lives. Anyone committing suicide in public in the UK (rather
than killing themselves in the privacy of their own home or in the anonymity of
a hotel room) is likely to one of three methods, throwing themselves in front
of a swiftly moving heavy object like a train, throwing themselves from a
height, or drowning themselves. In London this makes the underground system the
most popular place to try to die – a 2017 study by Martin
& Rawala found that there were 644 attempted suicides on the tube network between
2000 and 2010, though thankfully only a proportion of these were successful (132
actual deaths between 2004 and 2010). Around 25 people a year kill themselves
in the Thames, mostly by jumping off one of the city’s bridges but many more potential
jumpers are talked down. The City of London Police, who deal with most
incidents, have suggested that anti-suicide nets are fitted to bridges to catch
suicides in mid plunge but as far as I am aware this hasn’t happened yet. A
suicide prevention fence has however been built on the Hornsey Road bridge in
Archway from which jumpers land, not in the Thames, but on the busy Archway
Road, the A1, 80 feet below. Official figures show that 5 people committed
suicide here between 2003 and 2017. Ironically Martin & Rawala’s research
reveals that Archway was the 5th most popular underground station for
attempting suicide; any would be suicide frustrated by the fences on the bridge
doesn’t have far to go to find an alternative venue to end everything.
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| The bridges over the Thames have a long tradition of suicides |
As with the Archway Bridge, the most celebrated suicide spots are not necessarily the most popular, perhaps just the most spectacular. In Thornbury’s day the spot to die in, in the Square Mile at least, was the Monument. As it is a 200-foot plunge from the viewing gallery to the pavement at Fish Street Hill, throwing yourself over the waist high wall in the gallery meant certain death. There were six, well publicised, suicides at the Monument before the city corporation took preventative measures and encased the viewing platform in an unbreachable iron cage. Clusters of felo-de-se have caused concern about copycat suicides since Goethe had the eponymous hero of ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’ put a bullet through his head in the novel’s finale and earnest young men across Europe donned yellow trousers and followed suit. In 1974 American Sociologist David Phillips produced statistical evidence to prove that the suicide rate increased after any well publicised suicide – a phenomenon he dubbed The Werther Effect (but otherwise often known as ‘the power of advertising’); subsequent studies have confirmed that the link exists. Luckily suicides generally receive much less media attention than murders, but not always. Suicides occurring in noteworthy locations or involving unusual methods of self-destruction are more likely to gather media attention and the publicity may then generate further suicide attempts, creating a suicide hotspot. This is what seems to have happened at Number 1, Poultry between 2007 and 2016, an address less than ten minutes’ walk away from the Monument, when 6 successful suicides, each generating more publicity than the last, gave the address a reputation as a magnet for those desperate and hopeless enough to want to end it all.
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| A map of London from the early 1600's showing St Benet Sherehog on St Pancras Lane |
1 Poultry lies almost at the heart of the City of London and has been in almost continual occupation since the Roman’s founded Londinium in 47CE. It was the site of the church of St Benet Sherehog which stood here, just to the north of the junction of St Pancras and Sise Lanes, from its foundation in around 1080 until it was burnt down in the Great Fire of 1666. James Elmes in A Topographical Dictionary of London and its Environs (1831) says:
ST. BENNETT'S, SHEREHOG, the church-yard of, is opposite to Size (formerly St. Sythe's) lane, on the south side of Pancras-lane, Bucklersbury. In the year 1323, it went by the name of St. Osyth's, subsequently corrupted to Sythes, and next to Size, from its being dedicated to a queen and martyr of that name. But she was divested of the tutelage of this church by Benedict Shorne, a fishmonger of London, who rebuilt and otherwise benefited it. He dedicated it to the saint whose name he bore, and his surname, being corrupted into Shrog, became, subsequently, Sherehog.
There is some dispute about Elme’s etymology which most sources now saying that because the church was once in the centre of the old wool district the name comes is more likely to come from “shere hog”, meaning a ram castrated after its first shearing (apparently sheep can be hogs or rather ‘hoggs’, not just pigs). Debris from the fire and subsequent building buried the church and its graveyard for over 300 years until archaeologists at the Museum of London excavated it in the 1980’s following the demolition of the old Victorian Mappin and Webb building and the erection of the monstrosity that currently occupies the site. The excavations revealed 42,000 fragments of pottery, 800 coins, 54,000 animal bones and the well-preserved churchyard containing the bones of hundreds of former Londoners (all carefully removed and preserved at the museum) and funeral monuments dating back to the Middle Ages. The oldest was a Purbeck Marble headstone bearing the Latin inscription ‘+HIC : IACET : IN : TUMULO : CONIUX : ALICIA : PETRI (In this tomb lies Alice the wife of Peter), possibly dating back as far as 1190. The site continued to be used a burial ground even after the fire. Amongst the more recent burials uncovered was the chest tomb of John Maurois, from London’s Huguenot community, who was buried on 21 January 1674.
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| The tomb of John Maurois excavated by MOLAS (note the skull and femur) |
In 1861 work started on the building of Queen Victoria Street, which runs from Blackfriars to Bank, cutting a Hausmann style diagonal swathe through the old city neighbourhoods and leaving a triangular site at 1 Poultry. In the late 1950’s Peter Palumbo and his father began quietly acquiring the various buildings that made up the site. Palumbo always had major plans for the redevelopment of the area; he commissioned the modernist American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to design a new building for the site in 1962. Palumbo obtained planning permission to build Mies’ design for free-standing, bronze-clad, 19-storey rectilinear tower in 1969 but final approval was held back by the City Corporation until most of the site had been acquired. By the time this happened, in 1982, the Corporation had done a complete volte-face and was now opposed to the scheme. A two-year public enquiry then followed with Prince Charles weighing in with the view that it would be “a tragedy if the character and skyline of our capital city were to be further ruined and St Paul’s dwarfed by yet another giant glass stump, better suited to downtown Chicago than the City of London”. Palumbo lost his battle to build Mies’ tower and the City Corporation lost its battle to save the existing buildings. Palumbo was allowed to level the site and he revenged himself by commissioning James Stirling to design the current building. Some people are fans; architectural writer Owen Hopkins wrote that “1 Poultry occupies the wedge-shaped site formed as Poultry and Queen Victoria Street converge at Bank. The apex of the wedge is one the most arresting architectural sights in London, looking out across the interchange like the prow of a ship. It comprises a tall archway topped by a sharp wedge of glazing, with a stone cylinder and transverse viewing deck above.” Others are less enthusiastic. Jonathan Meades wrote that Stirling’s "buildings, like their bombastic maker, looked tough but were perpetual invalids, basket cases." In 2016 the Department for Culture, Media and Sport accepted advice from Historic England on an application from the C20 Society and gave grade II listed status to 1 Poultry, making it the most modern listed building in the UK.
The Coq d’argent restaurant, opened in 1998 by Sir Terence Conran, occupies the top floor of the building, its name punning on the location and the name of the architect (Coq = Poultry, d’argent = Stirling). The restaurant has a famed roof space whose “outdoor terraces and gardens provide a verdant oasis in the heart of the Square Mile” according to the Coq’s website. Fay Maschler, reviewing the Coq shortly after it opened for the Evening Standard, was impressed by neither the food nor the ambience of Sir Terence’s diner (‘"Very Ramada Inn," said my companion as he tackled his roast pork with a piece of crackling that he claimed was closer in spirit to a toenail than to roasted skin’) but she agreed that “It is without question a dramatic location, made the more so by precipitous drops into the six-storey central well and bizarre protrusions beyond the building's edge that give the feeling of walking the plank. In the copious publicity Sir Terence is quoted as saying that he feels sure City workers will automatically think of Coq d'Argent as the place to celebrate a great deal.” Uncannily prescient, she then added, “It might also serve a function in darker times…” May 2007 and the start of the financial crisis were certainly darker times but whether they were a factor in the decision of 33-year-old city worker Richard Ford to kill himself, we will never know. Reporting of the Leytonstone man’s death was not extensive and no details of his personal life were given; what interest there was centred around the place and manner of his death rather than the motivation for the irrevocable act that ended his life. At 11.40am on Tuesday 29 May Richard Ford, dressed for the office in a suit and tie, took the lift to the roof garden of the Coq d’argent and very shortly afterwards fell 7 storeys onto the roof of a number 73 bus on Queen Victoria Street. Paramedics had to use ladders to climb onto the roof of the bus where they found Mr Ford already dead. A road worker who had witnessed the incident said “I turned around and saw him falling through the air coming down on his side. He hit the roof of the bus and it made a sickening thud. He hit it head first.” There was insufficient interest in the story for anyone from the news media to attend the inquest.
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| The roof garden of the Coq d'argent by Thomas Alexander Photography |
It
was two years before the next suicide from the Coq d’argent. On Sunday the 5th
July, just a couple of days before his 25th birthday, stockbroker Anjool Maldé visited
the restaurant at midday dressed in his favourite Hugo Boss suit, bought a
glass of champagne, paying in cash, then wandered out into the empty roof
garden and, still holding the glass, climbed over the railing and jumped from
the roof. Maldé had brought up in the quiet market
town of Yarm near Stockton-on-Tees and
gone to St Peters College, Oxford to study Geography. Before joining Deutsche
Bank he came second in the UK Graduate of the Year awards. His best friend told the inquest that Maldé was
convinced he would soon become the youngest vice-president of Deutsche Bank.
Instead when he was accused of posting a prank comment on a financial careers website,
pretending to be someone else, his bosses at the bank suspended him while his
computers were examined. Whilst he protested his innocence the Google email
account which sent the spoof message also sent emails to the bank client
involved, offering to pay £500 to charity to 'make the matter go away' and
saying the sender was 'feeling suicidal'. The City of London coroner Paul
Matthews recorded a verdict of suicide at the inquest in February 2010.
On
4 September 2012, 29-year-old Rema Begum from Manor Park in Newham, was the
next to kill herself. In December the
previous year she had lost her job at the British library after falling out
with one of the managers and had subsequently been diagnosed with depression.
Her problems began to multiply; a close relative died and she struggled to deal
with her grief and then her parents began to receive anonymous letters about
her lifestyle. The poison pen letter writer culled details of her personal life
from Facebook and told her parents that she was drinking alcohol and seeing non-muslim
men. The day before she died she had been discovered in her bedroom at home by
her parents with a rope around her neck. They had taken her to A&E at the
Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel where she had convinced staff that she was
just attention seeking and not seriously suicidal. The hospital discharged her with
a referral to a mental health unit. In the early evening of the 4th September she
had taken the lift up to the terrace bar at the Coq d’argent and bought herself
a glasss of white wine. At around 6.30pm she put down her handbag and glass, placing
a note carefully beneath it. Diners watched her climb over the railings and
onto a ledge and then fall 80 feet to the pavement. Commuters heading for Bank
Station only saw her hit the ground a few feet from the tube entrance. She was
killed instantly. At the inquest her psychiatrist told the coroner, Paul
Matthews once again, that she felt guilty for not living her life “according to
her family values and religion” and felt she would be “punished for leading a
bad life”.
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| An aerial view of outdoor area of the Coq d'argent at 1 Poultry |
Wilkes
McDermid was a successful, full time, blogger, writing about London’s street
food scene. Originally working in finance, initially at Blomberg and later at
Calypso Technology, he was born in Luton to Chinese parents, and had been
William Chong before he changed his name by deed poll. There had been a
previous suicide attempt in 2012; on boxing day he had flown to South Africa
with the intention of throwing himself off Table Mountain but, as he later
wrote in his blog, strong winds, fog and the proliferation of tourists on the
mountain meant he was unable to see his plan through. Wilkes was a regular at the Coq d’argent. On the
morning of Sunday 8th February 2015 he posted details of his ‘final’ meal on
Twitter ("There seems to be a fascination on 'final meals' with many people on line" he wrote), a 400g ribeye steak at Hawksmoor in Spitalfields (presumably eaten the
day before) and in the afternoon posted another tweet saying ‘Final message...
thank you everyone’ with a link to a post on his blog explaining his reasons
for committing suicide. He then went to the Coq where he drank a beer and
smoked a cigar before throwing himself from the parapet onto the street. His
final blog entry read (in part):
The
reason for my death is simple. I have concluded that in the realm of dating and
relationships the primary characteristics required for men are as follows.
- Height: above 5ft10
- Race: huge bias towards
caucasian and black
- Wealth: or other manifestation of
power
From
my observations and research it appears that you need two of the three criteria
for success with very few exceptions. What does this mean it means that it’s
“game over” for me. By choosing to depart early, all I am doing is to
accelerate the process of natural selection whilst saving myself a great deal
of long term pain in the process.
On
the 17th January 2016, 29 year old Mike Halligan from Dublin became the sixth
and final person to kill themselves at the Coq d’argent. Mr Halligan was a Vodaphone
sales rep and made a special journey to London to kill himself and can only
have chosen the Coq because of the publicity surrounding the other suicides. He
travelled to London on via the Dublin-Holyhead ferry and the train to Paddington
on Saturday 16th January and spent the day on his own in the city. On the Sunday he visited
the Coq at around 2.50pm and ordered a meal. He quietly ate his food and at
then at 4.04pm he left his table, scaled the six-foot security fence on the
terrace and threw himself from the roof. He hit the ground in front of a group
of tourists who were on a walking tour. One of the group, Fabian Graimann told
the inquest “We had just been talking about the fact that Monument was a place
where suicides took place. I saw him climb over the railings facing the
direction of the Royal Exchange. He then shuffled along the outside of the
bridge facing my direction. As he reached the end he jumped forward off the
bridge.” A Metropolitan Police Sargeant who had been put in charge of the
investigation into Mr Halligan’s death told the coroner that there were various
unsent text messages on his phone; “I am
bored of life and the future possibilities disinterest me. It’s nobody’s fault.
Nothing could have been done to change it.” Another said: “I am not made for
this world.” While the final message read: “I have cracked.”
Since 2016 there have been no further suicides at 1 Poultry.
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