- William Shakespeare's only known London house was located in Blackfriars, bought in 1613
- The property was an L-shaped building partly over the Blackfriars gatehouse from a medieval monastery
- The house was near the Blackfriars Theatre where Shakespeare's company performed their plays
William Shakespeare bought a house in London, and we might know where exactly it was. According to a BBC report, researchers for the first time pinpointed the exact location, size and layout of his only known London property. It's apparently a Blackfriars house he bought in 1613 that later vanished in the Great Fire of London. Shakespeare expert Professor Lucy Munro, from King's College London, made the discovery while researching local playhouses at the London Archives. She found three key documents, two at The London Archives and one at The National Archives. The find also included a 1668 plan of the Blackfriars precinct.
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"I came across it in the London Archives when I was looking for other things," Munro said as quoted. "I was doing research as part of a wider project and couldn't believe it when I realised what I was looking at - the floorplan of Shakespeare's Blackfriars house."
"It had been assumed that there wasn't much more evidence to gather about it, so research on it has laid dormant for a while. These findings really help us tell the complete story of Shakespeare's Blackfriars house, and thanks to this new discovery, we now know exactly where it stood."
Munro told CNN that the property was not huge; it was a relatively substantial L-shaped building, part of it built over the Blackfriars gatehouse, carved from a former medieval monastery.
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The house sat close to the Blackfriars Theatre, where Shakespeare's company performed. "This house was close to [Shakespeare's] workplace at the Blackfriars theatre," Munro said as quoted.
"We know that Shakespeare co-authored Two Noble Kinsmen with John Fletcher later in 1613, and this new evidence that the Blackfriars house was quite substantial makes it not inconceivable that some of it may have been written in this very property."
Blackfriars in the 1610s was prestigious but socially mixed, home to gentry and tradespeople. Previously, many scholars assumed Shakespeare had left London by then and retired to Stratford-upon-Avon. But owning property in London in 1613, three years before his death in 1616 at age 52, indicates he hadn't fully retreated to Stratford.
The new evidence also suggests he kept a London base later in life than previously thought.
Official statement confirms that the property covered what are now the eastern end of Ireland Yard, the bottom of Burgon Street and parts of the late-nineteenth-century buildings at 5 Burgon Street and 5 St Andrew's Hill.
