17th-Century Map Pinpoints Shakespeare's London Home in Blackfriars

A newly identified 17th-century floorplan has pinned William Shakespeare’s only London home to a specific spot in Blackfriars, ending a mystery that had lingered since the 18th century and shifting the map of the playwright’s life in the city.

Professor Lucy Munro of King’s College London found three relevant archival documents in The London Archives, including a 1668 plan of part of the Blackfriars precinct drawn after the Great Fire of London. That plan confirms the exact location and size of the property Shakespeare bought on 10 March 1613, a place long assumed to sit somewhere near the precinct’s gatehouse but never nailed down with certainty. The dark-blue City of London plaque on the 19th-century building at 5 St Andrew’s Hill had only said Shakespeare purchased lodgings “near this site,” leaving generations of historians to work with approximation rather than proof.

The newly found drawing shows the house was not a modest lodging but a substantial L-shaped dwelling carved out of a former medieval monastery. The surviving portion measured 45 feet east to west, 15 feet north to south at the eastern end and 13 feet at the western end. The portion over the gate itself does not appear on the map because it lacked a foundation, but the surviving structure was large enough to be divided into two houses by 1645. Munro said the discovery adds “extra bits of the jigsaw puzzle” to Shakespeare’s life.

The location matters because it places Shakespeare in one of London’s most distinctive urban districts. The Blackfriars precinct began as a 13th-century Dominican friary and was redeveloped after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. By Shakespeare’s time, it had become an elite but slightly down-market enclave where nobles, courtiers and the world of the stage sat side by side. The precinct also held the Blackfriars playhouse, which Shakespeare part-owned, making the proximity between home and work more than a matter of convenience.

The new address also sharpens questions about Shakespeare’s later years. The property passed through his family after he left it to his daughter Susanna, and his granddaughter, Elizabeth Hall Nash Barnard, sold it in 1665. The building burned in the Great Fire of London a year later. With the house now fixed to St Andrew’s Hill, historians can read Shakespeare not just as a Stratford figure who briefly worked in London, but as a property owner whose life in the capital was more rooted, more social and more spatially embedded than the old record suggested.