Here is the pub “Gunmakers” in Eyre Street Hill, Farringdon.
Eyre Street Hill is a small sloping street in Farringdon, within the triangle made by Rosebery Avenue, Clerkenwell Road, and the Farringdon Road.
It slopes down to the River Fleet which is now below ground. I marked the approximate route of the Fleet on the map below:
It is a very old street, laid out in the 1720s as “Little Bath Street”. “British History Online” contains a detailed history of the area. This tells me that here and to the north was called “Coldbath Fields” in around 1719. The small houses in Eyre St were beside the Cold Bath, “a privately run hydropathic establishment opened in the late 1690”. This was on the edge of town. But then the came a distillery, a smallpox hospital and a workhouse.
“On the north-western ground, now largely occupied by Mount Pleasant Sorting Office, a distillery was built in the 1730s, and a smallpox hospital in the 1750s. These were joined towards the end of the eighteenth century by the prison, the Middlesex House of Correction, which became notorious for the brutality of its regime. South of the Cold Bath, near the old and insalubrious quarter called Hockley-in-the-Hole, the parish workhouse, built in the 1720s, was greatly enlarged in 1790.”
British History Online (see reference below)
Then Rosebery Avenue and Farringdon Road were built, with much demolition and reconstruction. By the beginning of the twentieth century, this area became part of “Little Italy”, a centre of the Italian Community. St Peter’s Church, on Clerkenwell Road, is still “the Italian Church”.
I can find no reference to this pub, or to gunmaking in the area. The building looks like one of the ones built in 1812:
“Today the oldest structures are the small, single-bay houses with shopfronts at Nos 33–37, dating from the early nineteenth century and fairly typical of the rebuilding that took place in the area at that time. Nos 33 and 35 were erected as a pair around 1812 by Thomas Abbott, builder, of Leather Lane.”
British History Online (see reference below)
In the right background of my drawing is a magnificent castellated building, now obscured by the newly-built “Ruby Stella Hotel” .
I was sketching, appropriately enough, in “Summers Street”. It was 20 June and the first sun of summer arrived. The pub was doing a brisk trade.
After about an hour of drawing on location, I added the colour at my desk later.
All quotes are from British History Online Volume 47, pages 22-51 with this reference:
‘West of Farringdon Road’, Survey of London: Volume 47, Northern Clerkenwell and Pentonville, (London, 2008), pp. 22-51. British History Online https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol47/pp22-51 [accessed 22 June 2024].
Jane Sketching 