Old Houses in Gray's Inn Lane, ca.1878

From: A.& J. Bool

RA Collection: Art

"Opposite the entrance to Verulam Buildings in Gray's Inn. The houses were demolished soon after the taking of this photograph, for the purpose of widening the street. One of the group of houses bore on a carved corbel a date towards the close of the sixteenth century; maps of the beginning of the eighteenth century showing very little extension of building north of Liquorpond Street."

The above description, by Alfred Marks, was taken from the letterpress which accompanies the photographs. Gray's Inn Lane, (now Gray's Inn Road) described in 1878 by Thornbury in Old and New London as a narrow, dingy thoroughfare, had several literary associations, it was the road by which Fielding's Tom Jones entered London, James Shirley (1596-1666), the dramatist resided here and it was the favourite haunt of the poet John Langhorne (1735-1779).