Pictorial Agency.
DR. JOHNSON’S HOUSE.
Gough Square is also associated with the name of the great lexicographer. The Society of Arts have placed a circular tablet on the wall of the house, No. 17, which faces eastward. Johnson lived here from 1741 to 1758. The house is an old eighteenth-century brick one, not very large, and not remarkable in any way. A printer and a publisher share the ground-floor, and above is a reading club. The doorway is slightly decorative, and the heavy woodwork of the door itself and the massive chain remain as they were in Johnson’s time. The Club was founded by a Mr. Campbell in 1887 for the recreation and assistance of working lads and girls in the district. There are now one hundred members. The remainder of the Square varies in character. On the south side, and at the east end, there are old eighteenth-century brick houses of the usual pattern. One or two of the doorways have carved brackets, and one fluted pilasters. Over the entry from Goldsmith Street is another house similar in character, but the rest of the north side is of obtrusively new brick buildings. The Square continuing southward contains some warehouses and a few old houses.
The name of Water Lane was changed to Whitefriars Street. Thomas Tompion (d. 1713), the “father of English watch-making,” lived at the corner.
Salisbury Square occupies the site of the courtyard of Salisbury House, the residence of the Bishops of Salisbury, afterwards called Dorset House. In Dorset Gardens beside the river was the Duke’s Theatre. Betterton, Harris, Underhill, and Sandford, actors, lived in this court. Here also lived for a time John Dryden, Shadwell, and Lady Davenant, widow of Sir William Davenant. But the chief glory of Salisbury Court or Square is its memory of Richardson, novelist and printer. His house was in the north-west angle, his printing offices on the east side; here he wrote Pamela; here, for a time, Goldsmith was his press corrector. The theatre called the Salisbury Court Theatre was constructed in 1629 out of the barn or granary at the lower end of the court. It was the seventeenth theatre opened in London within a period of sixty years. The house was pulled down in 1649: rebuilt in 1660, and occupied by the Duke’s Company until their new theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields was ready for them. It was destroyed in the Great Fire. The Duke’s Theatre in Dorset Gardens, opened on November 9, 1671, stood facing the river on a different site. In Salisbury Square is the headquarters of the Church Missionary Society.
ST. BRIDE
St. Bride’s or St. Bridget’s is another Fleet Street church. It derives its name from St. Bridget, a saint of the seventh century. No mention of the church has been discovered earlier than 1222. It was destroyed by the Great Fire and rebuilt in 1680 by Wren; the steeple, one of his greatest achievements, was added in 1701. This has been struck several times by lightning, and in 1764 part of it was taken down and lowered by 8 feet. The earliest date of an incumbent is 1306.
The patronage of the church was in the hands of: The Abbot and Convent of Westminster as a rectory from 1306 up to 1507, when a vicarage was ordained in the same patronage; Dean and Chapter of Westminster, in whose successors it continues, since 1573.
Houseling people in 1548 were 1400.
The interior of this church is considered to be one of the best specimens of Wren’s work. It is entered by a porch within the tower, and is divided into a nave and aisles by an arcade of doubled columns on both sides. The length of the church is 111 feet, its breadth 57 feet, and its height, to the roof of the nave, 41 feet. The height of the tower to the top of the parapet is 120 feet, above which the spire rises in four octagonal stories, surmounted by an obelisk and vane. There are vases at the corners of the parapet, introduced to soften the transitions. St. Bride’s Avenue, designed by J. B. Papworth in 1825, affords an open view of this steeple, before obstructed by intervening houses.