Survey of London, Volume 05 (of 14), the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, part 2 — Edition Insights

From Pasture to Building Plot

The volume repeatedly traces how open land was enclosed and developed. The “Pale Close” and the four acres of pasture purchased by Francis Downes in 1564 become, by 1622, “two closes, formerly pasture, late converted into gardens.” This transformation is not narrated as a story but emerges from the juxtaposition of deeds and surveys. The reader sees the same ground—first grazing, then gardens, then houses—through successive legal descriptions.

The editors let the documents speak: a 1618 sale of the White House includes “one yard, one garden and one long walke, and one stable with a hay lofte over the same.” By 1681 the house is “very ruinous and scarcely habitable,” and a hatmaker rebuilds it as Dudley Court. The movement from rural to urban is implicit in the shift from “messuage” to “third rate buildings” under the Act for Rebuilding the City.

The Gatehouse and Its Neighbors

A recurring structural device is the use of a single building—the Gatehouse—as a reference point for locating other properties. The text notes that Lady Dudley’s stable was “to the north of the Gatehouse, which, as has been shown, was near the north-west angle of the churchyard.” This anchoring allows the reader to orient themselves in a now-vanished street pattern.

The Gatehouse itself is never described in detail; it functions as a coordinate. Similarly, the “Spittle Houses” are located “immediately to the east of the churchyard” and shown “distinctly on Agas’s Map.” The volume thus moves between text and plate, using the map as a visual key. The reader is invited to cross-reference the verbal description with the reproduced map, a movement that mirrors the surveyor’s own method.

The White House and Its Afterlife

The White House is a case study in how the volume handles a single property across time. First mentioned in 1618 as a “messuage or tenement” with a yard, garden, walk, and stable, it is purchased by Lady Dudley in 1631 and transferred to trustees for a parsonage. The lease held by Edward Smith lasts until 1681, by which time the house is “very ruinous.” The Rector then contracts with John Boswell, a hatmaker, to rebuild “with all materials and scantlings conformable to the third rate buildings.”

The result is Dudley Court, later Denmark Place. The volume does not moralize about decay or renewal; it simply records the sequence of owners, leases, and building regulations. The reader is left to infer the social change: a grand house becomes a parsonage, then a tenement court, then a street. The movement is from singular to plural, from one dwelling to many.

Maps, Deeds, and the Reconstructed Landscape

The volume’s structure depends on the interplay of three kinds of evidence: maps (especially Agas’s Map), deeds (quoted at length), and the editors’ own site visits. The text often says “as has been shown” or “as will be seen,” creating a web of cross-references. The reader is expected to move back and forth between pages, tracing the same location through different documents.

Recurring phrases like “the above is not as clear as it might be” acknowledge the limits of the evidence. The editors do not pretend to certainty; they present the documents and let the reader judge. This honesty is part of the volume’s method: the movement between scenes is not smooth but jagged, full of gaps and ambiguities. The reader becomes a collaborator in the survey, piecing together the parish from fragments.

The volume rewards a patient reader who is willing to follow the chain of ownership from one deed to the next. Pay attention to the recurring images—the stable, the garden, the “long walke”—as they mark the persistence of rural features within an urbanizing parish. The movement between map and text, between general description and specific plot, is the key to understanding how the editors reconstructed this lost landscape.