World Wide Words provides the following explanation:
Some of the references are now quite opaque, but we can take a fair shot at a few. In the second verse, the City Road was, still is, a well-known street in London, more than a mile long. The Eagle was a famous public house and music hall, which lay near the east end of the road on the corner of Shepherdess Walk; this had started its life as a tea-garden, but was turned into a music hall in 1825 (one of the very first); it ended its days as a Salvation Army centre and was pulled down in 1901. However, it was replaced by another pub, which still exists under the same name.
The City Road had a pawnbroker’s shop near its west end and to pop was a well-known phrase at the time for pawning something. So the second verse says that visiting the Eagle causes one’s money to vanish, necessitating a trip up the City Road to Uncle to raise some cash. But what was the weasel that was being pawned? Nobody is sure. Some suggest it was a domestic or tailor’s flat-iron, a small item easy to carry. My own guess is that it’s rhyming slang: weasel and stoat = coat. Either way, it seems to have been a punning reinterpretation of the catch line from the older dance.
This section lists the memorials where the subject on this page is commemorated:
Pop goes the weasel
Commemorated ati
Eagle Tavern - song
Up and down the City Road In and out the Eagle That's the way the money goe...
Other Subjects
Dave Clark
Born Tottenham. Leader and drummer of The Dave Clark Five a beat combo from the 1960s. He wrote and produced Time, a successful science fiction stage musical, in which Laurence Olivier's hologram f...
Marie Kendall
Music hall artiste. Born Bethnal Green, as Mary Ann Florence Holyome. Successful as a male impersonator but also as a woman singing "I'm one of the girls". Toured America and Australia. Grandmoth...
Samuel Stennett, DD
Baptist minister and hymnwriter. Born Exeter. His father was appointed minister at Little Wild Street chapel from 1737 so the family moved to London. See Andrew Gifford for the rather unsavoury ...
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Clement Attlee - Stanmore
HA7, London Road, 135, Heywood Court
From Hansard and the Harrow Medical Officer during 1947-70 (at least) here was the Heywood Nursing Home for "maternity and surgical", wit...
Nancy's Steps - plaque 2
SE1, Montague Close
Erected between April 2019 and August 2020, by unknown.
Auxiliary Fireman Mervyn James Taylor
From the Sub Fire Station 6W, Cheyne Place. Died in a fire which took the lives of seven firemen, known as "The Wednesday".
C. R. Cruwys
Co-partner or employee of the South Suburban Gas Company. Served but did not die in WW1.
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