By the 19th century the Newbons had become very much a London family. The scenes sketched so memorably by Dickens would thus have been second nature to them. But during the previous century, still in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London, London was a more optimistic city, very much in the business of reinventing itself.

By the time Richard Newbon of Westminster married Elizabeth Aslaby at St Clement Danes in 1718 the London Samuel Pepys had so vividly described half a century before had changed beyond recognition. In place of the medieval lanes in which Pepys had grown up a new metropolis had sprung up from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1666, largely designed by Sir Christopher Wren. The old Norman St Paul’s Cathedral, like so many other churches (including St Bride’s, Fleet Street, where Pepys had been baptised), had been replaced by Wren’s buildings.

Richard Newbon of Westminster spent the last decade of his life living in Charges Street, just off Piccadilly. He was most likely the first occupier of his house in this new fashionable west-end district of Mayfair. This was a delightful part of London in which to live, with Green Park and St James’s Parks close by, as well as the court. Many important events thus took place almost on the Newbons’ doorstep: for example, Richard’s widow Elizabeth Newbon must surely have seen the great firework display in Green Park in 1749 for which Handel wrote the famous music to celebrate the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. The theatres of the west end were also only a short distance away; if the Newbons were a culture-loving family they would have been spoilt for choice. The seedier sides of 18th-century London were painted brought to life with great realism by William Hogarth.

Many books help us get a feeling for life in London past. Among the most informative are those by Liza Picard. Her Dr. Johnson’s London gives a detailed account of London life between 1740 and 1770, the period when Walter Newbon and other members of the family arrived in London.


The London of Samuel Pepys
One of the most fruitful sources of information about the London of any bygone age is undoubtedly the so-called Great Diary kept by Samuel Pepys between 1660 and 1669. It is a happy coincidence that Pepys’s life intersects with the story of the Newbon family at several points and it thus illuminates their story in various ways, even though it was written decades before the Newbons’ arrival in the capital.

Pepys was born in 1633 in Salisbury Court, just off Fleet Street at the western edge of the City of London, the 5th of 11 children born to John Pepys, a tailor, and his wife Margaret – only 4 of these children survived to adulthood and Samuel was both the eldest and the longest lived of them, dying in 1703 after a long career of distinguished civil service.


Parallels between the Pepys and Newbon families
It seems reasonable to assume that Richard Newbon the Elder (almost certainly the first member of the family to come to the capital) arrived in London during the last years of Samuel Pepys’s life, but it is not until later in the 18th century, once Walter Newbon’s family had become established in Blackfriars, that parallels between the Pepys family and the Newbons arise: