For most of its life, Britton Street has been called Red Lion Street after a local tavern of that name. It was only in 1937 that Red Lion Street was renamed Britton Street, after ‘antiquary’ John Britton who was an apprentice printer in the building which later became the Jerusalem Tavern (now the Holy Tavern). An antiquary was an amateur archaeologist, and Britton’s claim to fame is that he originated a new class of literary work known as ‘popular typology’- an appreciation of the rolling hills and the ancient buildings of England. His most famous work was ‘The Beauties of Wiltshire’.
The development was the brainchild of Simon Michell. If you think some of the Britton Street houses remind you of merchant houses you have seen near Brick Lane, you are not wrong. Michell also built the houses in Wilkes, Fournier and Princelet Streets. The closer you were to Clerkenwell Green, the more desirable your property, so that was the end where the best houses were built, which included stabling and coach houses for wealthier occupiers. Houses further south were generally smaller. However, at the time, Britton Street – Red Lion Street – ran right up to Clerkenwell Green, because Clerkenwell Road did not exist until the 1870s. When Clerkenwell Road was constructed, many of the bigger houses of the street were demolished to make way for it.
Going back in history a bit, this whole area used to belong to the Priory of St John of Jerusalem which owned a large part of Clerkenwell until the 16th century. After the ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’ under Henry VIII, the land was sold off. In 1573 It was sold to Thomas Sekforde – who gave his name to Sekforde Street. In the 1590s a goldsmith called John Ballet bought it and it remained in his family until the early 18th century when the family sold the land. Most of it was sold in 1716 to Simon Michell, a lawyer, but also a property developer.
About 70 houses were built in Britton Street between 1718 and 1724 and ten of them still survive – five on each side of the street. The current state of these houses ranges from the almost original to some which have been modernised (in the 19th century mainly) even to the extent of rebuilding the front walls and façades. Given how much time has passed since, they now look as old as the unaltered ones.
Michell didn’t carry out any building through his own company. As was usual for landowners in the 18th century, he leased out plots to individual builders and developers on 61 year leases. George Greaves, a carpenter by trade, built many of the houses, but there were many other builders involved, some only building single houses, to Michell’s specifications.
Michell had greater ambitions than just building and selling houses. His main interest was in creating a new parish of St John in Clerkenwell and he was closely involved in renovating the former Priory Church of St John in St John’s Square as the parish church. He was adamant that the residents of new houses in Red Lion Street should use ‘his’ church rather than the nearer church of St James on Clerkenwell Green at the top of the street. He even built one of the new houses as the rectory of St John although clearly it was too far away to be convenient for the church – with the result that several rectors never lived there (and probably chose properties in Clerkenwell Close instead).
Michell was very much involved in the development of Clerkenwell as a whole and he became the Commissioner of Sewers for Holborn and Finsbury and a local magistrate. He was so unpopular as a magistrate that at his funeral a local mob was “with difficulty restrained from committing outrage on his remains”.
Britton Street has had fluctuating fortunes. As soon as it was built, it quickly became established as one of the best residential districts in Clerkenwell. But as the century progressed there was a steady encroachment of craftsmen and tradesmen, particularly clock- and watch-makers and cabinetmakers who took over buildings as the wealthier residents retreated to homes in the more fashionable West of London. Many of the surviving houses have watchmakers’ windows, as they’re called, in the attics – windows that capture the last moments of sun for craftsmen wrestling with intricate mechanisms.
No. 1 Britton Street is the big yellow brick development on the corner with Clerkenwell Road, opposite the Red House, which was built in 1998 on the site of Booths Gin’s disused Red Lion Distillery. The new building has a double-height ground floor used as offices and showrooms, with flats and a penthouse above. The architects were Green Moore Lowenhoff, who had already designed the buildings of Clerkenwell Central, the big residential development next door at Nos. 13-16 Britton Street, and would also design Nos 51–53 Britton Street and 1–31 Briset Street.
Nos. 13-16 Britton Street (also Nos. 1-18 Dickens Court) is part of a large development called Clerkenwell Central which goes through to Turnmill Street. Nos 13–16 was originally a warehouse or factory built in 1905. The red-brick and stone façade was retained but all the rest is new buildings created in the 1990s by the developer, Persimmon. The architects were again Green Moore Lowenhoff.
Nos. 17 – 18 Britton Street is a modern building which makes fun use of bricks, with alternate layers sticking out, and the lintels above the doors and windows formed of bricks laid vertically. Attractive yellow wood is used for surrounds and door frames. There’s a weird arrangements of wall-to-ceiling doors in the first windows with no balconies outside – Christmas cancelled early for anyone who takes a wrong step at the office party!
Nos. 19-20 Britton Street is a pair of warehouse buildings. No. 19 Britton Street is a five-storey warehouse or factory of yellow brick, and it was built in 1916 for a company of manufacturing opticians. In 1929 they had No. 20 built in a matching style to accommodate their expanding business.
Mountford House at No. 25 Britton Street was built in 1977 as part of the redevelopment of the former Booth’s distillery site in Turnmill Street. The reason why Mountford House looks so impressive is that the developers moved the 1903, very extravagant, façade of Booth’s’ main entrance from its Turnmill Street location and made it the façade of the new Mountford House building. It is very impressive and was certainly worth preserving. The upper part of Mountford House rests on huge pillars with semi-circular church-like arches. The top of the highly elaborate façade contains a series of carved panels showing country workmen and their animals. A passage leads through to a courtyard development at the back with a very modern office block – all red panels and glass – and lightwells looking down at another two storeys below ground. This is No. 24 Britton Street. The buildings are all occupied by Kurt Geiger. Some of offices overlook St John’s Gardens in Benjamin Street. The developers must have been big fans of the Edwardian distillery building – not only did they save the façade by relocating it to No, 25 Britton Street, they also called the new building ‘Mounford House’ after the designer of the 1903 building – EW Mountford.
Nos. 27-32 Britton Street is a row of four houses built in 1723.
Brittion Street was extended as far as Eagle Court in the 1960s, and when the former Danish Bacon Co.’s site on the north side of Cowcross Street was redeveloped to create City Pavilion and Exchange Place, Britton Street was extended again to include the piazza in front of Exchange Place.
On the east side of the street, the numbers run from south to north. The modern Goldsmiths Centre with its coffee bar and restaurant next door is at No. 42 Britton St.
On the corner of Benjamin Street is No. 44 Britton Street, the distinctive house designed for Janet Street-Porter, the TV personality, by her fellow student at architecture college, Piers Gough. Nos. 46 – 47 Britton Street is a small modern building of four storeys.
No. 48 Britton Street is the survivor of a terrace of eight houses built in 1722. It has been through a number of transformations in its life. It began as an ale-house called the Red Lion. There must have been an interesting story behind that choice of name – a rivalry of some sort – because there was already a tavern called the Red Lion at the top end of the street. From about 1883 it was a full public house and known as the Red Lion and French Horn. The pub called time in the mid–1930s and then the building was occupied by a firm of glass-benders, then by antique dealers, and finally by ‘the Cylinder Gallery’, before being refurbished in 1993 as offices for the architects Green Moore Lowenhoff, and then finally being converted to its present use as a family home.
No. 49 Britton Street was rebuilt in 1939, apparently as a speculation by a builder. Certainly little love was lavished on its concrete front and metal-frame windows.
No. 50 Britton Street is a plain, very tall, red-brick – high quality red brick – factory or warehouse which was built in about 1904.
Nos. 52-53 Britton Street occupies the corner plot and has a return frontage in Briset Street. The upper floors, which contain flats, are supported on concrete columns. This was another development in Britton Street designed by the architects Green Moore Lowenhoff (later GML Architects), who were themselves based at No. 48 Britton Street. They really seem to have mopped up the market for new developments in Britton Street.
There is a series of rather beautiful surviving period houses at this point in the street, all of which were built in 1722. You will notice that date (or close to it) coming up frequently in this street. Most of the street was allocated in plots to builders at that time, but due mainly to bombing in the war and replacement of dilapidated buildings in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Georgian houses only survive in isolated pockets along either side of Britton Street.
No. 54 Britton Street, built in 1772, is one of the larger houses in the street, with a width of three bays rather than the usual two. It is also one of the least altered. The building became offices in the 1930s for a cold storage company who built a cold store at the back.
No. 55 Britton Street, built in 1772, was constructed so as to allow St John’s Path to run underneath its north side. (St John’s Path was known as St John’s Passage until 1939. It is hard to imagine why the council needed to go to all the trouble to change the name to ‘Path’ when it is so obviously a ‘Passage’). It is believed that the shop front and façade of the whole building was rebuilt in the 1800s. It was occupied by a watchmaker and then a toolmaker. The ground floor is now ‘The Holy Tavern’ (‘holy’ spelt with a cross). Previously it was the ‘Jerusalem Tavern’. The Jerusalem Tavern looked so quaint and olde worldy that a lot of people must have headed there if only for the experience of drinking in a bygone age when ale was ale. But in fact that was always a wrong assumption. It was only in the 1990s that a brewery converted the upper floors from offices back to flats, and created the Jerusalem Tavern. Having pulled off the trick of making it seem like a survival from centuries ago, it seems very counter-productive to give it a new and slightly weird name.
No. 56 Britton Street, built in 1722, is another quite wide (for its time) house, which has been restored. It has particularly high first floor windows.
The row of 1772 houses used to include No. 57 Britton Street. But it was replaced in 1890 with a new warehouse in Queen Anne-style. No. 58 is another rebuild, this time in 1913. (It was originally a ‘platechest factory’ – I have no idea what that might be.) It has large windows in the upper storeys, and a very ugly extraction unit like the rear view of an aeroplane engine stuck prominently through the glazed ground floor frontage.
With No. 59 Britton Street we are back to a relatively unrestored period house. This was – you guessed it – built in 1722. For the next 200 years this was the rectory of St John’s Church on the other side of Clerkenwell Road. Although it was so far away that many rectors chose to live closer to the shop.
Nos. 60 and 61 Britton Street were built in about 1910 as warehouses for a firm manufacturers of jewellery cases and display fittings. There must have been an explanation for why they built two separate warehouses at the same time, which were very similar in design but not identical, and one about twice the size of the other. We will never know.
Those are the last buildings in Britton Street. The adjoining building, the Red House, is treated as belonging to Clerkenwell Road.