Charles Dickens' Dog and Pot - London, UK
Posted by: 
back_ache
N 51° 30.220 W 000° 06.254
30U E 700967 N 5709812
Dog and Pot sculpture.
Waymark Code: WMNBCW
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 02/06/2015
Views: 8
The sign of the Dog and Pot, once a familiar and well known Southwark landmark in its day was originally outside an ironmonger’s shop on Blackfriars Road from the 1780’s and remained there until 1932, when it was removed to the Cuming Museum in Walworth Road where it can still be seen. The sign however was much more than just a shop’s sign, it was used as a design on Victorian coal hole covers, those round metal plates that covered the delivery hatches to coal cellars. One of these was the inspiration for the sculpture. The firm of J.W.Cunningham, ‘wholesale and retail ironmongers, steel and grindstone merchants’ at No. 196 Blackfriars Road, put it on their plates in 1882, and between 1849 and 1857, when the shop was owned by the much more celebrated firm of Hayward Brothers, a small version of the sign appeared on their plates.
Charles Dickens, however made the sign a far more significant matter. When he worked as a child in what to him was the notorious blacking factory at Hungerford Stairs near Charing Cross, his father was taken as a prisoner for debt to the Marshalsea Prison in Borough High Street. So 12-year-old Charles was found lodging nearby, in Lant Street. He was quoted in later years as saying:
‘My usual way home was over Blackfriars Bridge, and down that turning in the Blackfriars Road which has Rowland Hill’s chapel on one side, and the likeness of a golden dog licking a golden pot over a shop door on the other’.
Breed: Unknown
Date Built: 6 February 2013
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