Nursery Rhymes About London
More nursery rhymes have been written about London than about any other city. They kept London Bridge famous long after the old bridge was pulled down, handed the baked-goods sellers of Drury Lane a jingle centuries before advertising existed, and warned children about fire for hundreds of years.
Each of the ten below names a real place: a church whose bells you can still hear, a tavern on City Road, a statue at Charing Cross. Click through for the full lyrics and the history of each.
London Bridge Is Falling Down
The old stone bridge of 1209 carried more than a hundred houses and shops, and the weight, the fires and the Thames currents kept it in near-constant repair. Wood and clay, iron and steel, silver and gold: every rebuild in the song fails in turn.
Oranges and Lemons
Every line is sung in the voice of a different London church bell, from St Clement's to the great bell of Bow. The bells of St Clement Danes were retuned in 1920 to play the tune, and still do.
London's Burning
Everyone links it to the Great Fire of 1666, but the round is older than the fire it seems to describe: an almost identical version about Scotland burning was written down in 1580.
The Muffin Man
The muffin man was a real London trade. Vendors carried trays of flat, toasted muffins on their heads and rang a handbell down lanes like Drury Lane, the street the rhyme names.
Pop! Goes the Weasel
"In and out the Eagle" is the Eagle Tavern on City Road. "Pop" was slang for pawning and the weasel was most likely a coat, so the song is about drinking the rent and pawning your good jacket to cover it.
Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat
A cat travels all the way to London to see the Queen, is given the run of the palace, and chases a mouse under her chair. The joke is its total indifference to the grandest city in the world.
As I Was Going by Charing Cross
The "black man upon a black horse" is the bronze statue of Charles I, cast in 1633, hidden during the Civil War and finally raised at Charing Cross in 1675, darkened by weather and London soot.
Hot Cross Buns
Before it was every child's first recorder tune it was a sales pitch, shouted by bakers working the crowded London streets at Easter. "One a penny, two a penny" was the price, not a lyric.
How Many Miles to London Town?
A local rewrite of How Many Miles to Babylon, with the far-off city swapped for the nearest big one. The answer, three score and ten, means seventy miles, and yes, you can be back by candlelight.
Ring a Ring o' Roses
Published in London by Kate Greenaway, and famous for a London connection that is not real: the Great Plague story was invented in the twentieth century, long after the rhyme was in print.
Why So Many Rhymes About London?
By 1800 London was the largest city in the world, home to some 1.1 million people. It was a crush of politics, trade, money and ideas, rich and poor packed in together, with a long history that was often violent. Most children never saw the inside of a school, so songs did work that newspapers and lessons do now: they carried news, gossip, prices and warnings.
London also had the printing presses. Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book was published there around 1744 and put both "London Bridge Is Falling Down" and "Oranges and Lemons" into type while they were still street songs. Rhymes sung a hundred miles away had to wait another century for a collector to come along.
The London You Can Still Walk To
These are not vague settings. The rhymes name streets and buildings, and most of them are still there:
- Cheapside and Bow - the "great bell of Bow" in Oranges and Lemons is St Mary-le-Bow, the bell that defines who counts as a true Cockney.
- The Old Bailey - the bell in that line belongs to St Sepulchre's, rung for executions at Newgate Prison across the road.
- Drury Lane - the muffin man's round, and a working theatre street since the 1660s.
- City Road - the Eagle Tavern of Pop! Goes the Weasel stood here, and a pub of that name still does.
- Charing Cross - the equestrian statue of Charles I has looked down Whitehall towards the site of his execution since 1675.
- Pudding Lane - where the Great Fire started in 1666, the blaze that London's Burning gets the credit for describing, despite predating it.
The Rhymes That Were Not About London At All
Two of the songs above were borrowed. "London's Burning" began as "Scotland's Burning", a round already in circulation in 1580, eighty-odd years before the Great Fire gave it a better story. "How Many Miles to London Town" is a local version of "How Many Miles to Babylon", with a city children had actually heard of standing in for the ancient one.
That swapping is how folk song works. A rhyme travels, the place name gets changed to whatever is nearest and largest, and in Britain that was usually London. It is part of why the capital ended up with a songbook the size it did.
Where to Go Next
- Nursery Rhymes with Dark Origins: the plague, the scaffold and the pawn shop, and which of those stories hold up.
- The Oldest Nursery Rhymes: ranked by the first date each one can be proven to exist.
- Nursery Rhymes About Ireland: Dublin, Belfast and Donegal, in English and in Irish.
- The History of Nursery Rhymes: how these songs got from the street to the printed page.