The work of the demolition of this massive keep was going on in 1775, but it does not seem to have proceeded regularly; people came and tore away fragments from the walls as they listed, and the gloomy building vanished piecemeal.
By Acts passed in the early part of the nineteenth century, part of Long Ditch, Bridge Street, Little George Street, and King Street were cleared away, also Broad and Little Sanctuary, Thieving Lane, and many small courts, and on the space thus obtained public seats were placed, flower-beds planted, and statues erected.
The statues on the quadrangular piece of ground in the centre are of Peel and Beaconsfield, north and south; Palmerston and Derby on the east. The statue of George Canning is in the western enclosure. Union Street ran due eastward to New Palace Yard, and must have cut very near the place where the statue of Palmerston now stands. The drinking fountain at the corner of Great George Street was put up by Charles Buxton in 1865 in memory of the abolition of the slave trade.
Westminster Abbey, Palace, and City stood formerly upon a small island called Thorney, the Isle of Bramble, a low-lying islet covered with brambles, nowhere more than three or four feet above the level of high-tide formed by the fall of the little river, the Tye, into the Thames. Part of this stream ran down Gardener's Lane; part of it diverged and ran south, forming a narrow moat or ditch called Long Lane, turned eastward at College Street, and so fell into the Thames. The island is mentioned in a charter of 785 by Offa, King of Mercia, as "Tornica, Locus terribilis"--_i.e._, sacred. It was about 1,410 feet long and 1,100 feet broad. It was almost entirely, save for a narrow piece of land on the north, occupied by the King's House and the Abbey. Both Palace and Abbey were surrounded by walls, one wall being common to both.
The Palace Precinct had three gates: one on the north, one on the east--leading to the Bridge, _i.e._, the jetty where the state barges and the boats lay--and a postern leading into the Abbey. Westminster was at first a large rural manor belonging to the Abbey before the erection of the Palace.
A large part of Thorney Island is still only slightly above the level of high-tide. King Street was 5 feet 6 inches only above high-water mark. This was the foundation of Westminster. It was a busy place long before London Bridge was built--a place of throng and moil as far back as the centuries before the coming of the Romans. A church was built in the most crowded part of it; monks in leathern jerkins lived beside the church, which lay in ruins for two hundred years, while the pagan Saxon passed every day beside it across the double ford. During the two hundred years of war and conquest by the Saxons, Westminster, quite forgotten and deserted, lay with its brambles growing over the Roman ruins, and the weather and ivy pulling down the old walls of villa and stationary camp piecemeal. Perhaps--rather probably--there had been a church upon the island in the third or fourth century. Soon after the conversion of the Saxons another church was erected here with a monastic house. Then there was another destruction and another rebuilding, for this place was deserted by the monks; perhaps they were murdered during the Danish troubles. It was King Edgar who restored the Abbey, to which Dunstan brought twelve monks from Glastonbury.