Evelyn Street — Named for the Wronged Diarist
Evelyn Street in Deptford, London, is a major thoroughfare named after the 17th-century diarist John Evelyn, whose nearby Sayes Court estate was ruined by Tsar Peter the Great. In January 1698, the Russian Tsar stayed at the property and severely vandalized it, breaking 300 window panes and destroying a 400-foot holly hedge with wheelbarrows. Sir Christopher Wren subsequently estimated the total damages at 350 pounds.
London · from the walk “The Tsar's Deptford” · Generated
Evelyn Street, Deptford SE8
- In January 1698, Tsar Peter the Great stayed at John Evelyn's Sayes Court estate in Deptford.
- The Russian royal entourage destroyed a 400-foot-long, nine-foot-high holly hedge by racing wheelbarrows through it.
- Sir Christopher Wren and George London estimated the total damages to Sayes Court at 350 pounds.
- A riverfront statue in Deptford commemorates Tsar Peter the Great alongside a dwarf from his entourage.
How did Tsar Peter the Great vandalize John Evelyn's Deptford estate?
You're standing on Evelyn Street... the main artery of Deptford, and one of the longest roads in southeast London. It looks ordinary enough today — buses, kebab shops, a laundrette or two. But this street bears the name of a man who suffered one of the most Spectacular acts of house-wrecking in British history... at the hands of a Russian Tsar.
John Evelyn is best remembered today as a diarist, albeit overshadowed by his contemporary Samuel Pepys. But Evelyn was far more than a chronicler. He was a key figure in the birth of modern science, a founding member of the Royal Society, and his book Sylva was the very first book that Society ever published.
His home, Sayes Court, stood just a short walk from here. It was a gorgeous property with a very decorative garden cultivated over a forty year period. Pepys himself called its holly hedges "the finest things I ever saw in my life."
Then, in January sixteen ninety-eight... disaster arrived. Tsar Peter the Great arrived in England with a large entourage that included four dwarfs. Why Deptford? The house was close to the dockyards, where Peter could study the drawing of ship plans. King William the Third offered him Evelyn's home.
What followed was... chaos. Evelyn's servants described the royal household as "right nasty." Among the items needing repair were three hundred broken panes of glass, one hundred and seventy feet of oak wainscoting, and two hundred and forty feet of fencing. The party used Evelyn's portrait gallery for target practice, and every chair in the house was burned for firewood.
But here's the detail everyone remembers. Evelyn's prize holly hedge was four hundred feet long, nine feet high, and five feet thick. The Russians discovered three wheelbarrows — which hadn't yet been Invented in Russia — and devised a game of sitting in them and being raced at speed through the hedge! They battered the whole thing to the ground.
On the fifth of June, sixteen ninety-eight, Evelyn wrote in his diary: "I went to Deptford to see how miserably the Tsar had left my house." He called in Sir Christopher Wren, the King's Surveyor, to estimate the repairs. Wren and the king's gardener George London estimated the damages at three hundred and fifty pounds — at least fifty thousand in today's money.
And Evelyn never forgot. In a later edition of Sylva, he wrote a bitter, beautiful passage about his "now ruined gardens at Sayes Court... thanks to the Tsar of Muscovy."
The irony? His unruly tenant Peter the Great has arguably fared Better in Deptford's memory — his statue stands on the riverfront nearby. And it is one of the strangest sculptures in London — a naval figure with a teeny tiny head... and an inexplicable dwarf beside him. Meanwhile, Evelyn got... this street. A road named in his honour, running right through the neighbourhood the Tsar once terrorised.