Experience how two ‘waste common fields’ where students jousted and hangmen castrated traitors coalesced, from the 1630s, into the very meridian of fashion, a parade of gorgeous brick-built houses for the cream of Stuart and Georgian society, yet with its vast inner space ‘forever open and unbuilt’, its riddled doxies, crooked link-boys and fake beggars a foil to those who swirled about them in sedan chairs. See the square’s sole-surviving original house, built by Inigo Jones in 1640, perhaps the oldest shop in England from 1657, Sir Charles Barry’s Royal College of Surgeons (1835), the labyrinthine turnstile streets which once prevented livestock darting out, and the fictional address of Bleak House’s sinister lawyer, Mr Tulkinghorn, where lawyers lay ‘in shrunken fragments of greatness…like maggots in nuts.’ Feel how these peculiar and unsettling juxtapositions somehow linger in the air like residual smoke from its seacoal-smeared terraces. Discover how this extraordinary quadrangle, along with its sister squares further west, precipitated the West End revolution, replacing tumbledown Tudor sprawls with elegant neo-classical terraces designed to inculcate politeness and civility, and making the urban urbane for the first time since the classical era.
The tour will end back at Sir John Soane’s Museum where Matthew will sign copies of his books.
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