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A History of the Quadrant House siteFrom a 16th century legal printing house to a 21st century legal power houseBy Edmund Fennell

Introduction

Enter Quadrant House – 10-15 Fleet Street – and you pass through a wormhole into a multiverse of London histories. Look at the map of London in the late 13th century, for example, and the site is clearly marked out, self-contained and distinct between Fleet Street to the north, Temple and Middle Lanes respectively to east and west and the vacant plot of what becomes Hare Court to the south.

By the mid-16th century the site is starting to acquire a unique status which will echo through the centuries. For at the western corner of the site was the building described as being at ‘the sign of the Star and Hand’. This was a printing shop and subsequently a bookshop. Moreover it had a unique relationship with the legal profession because this was the shop of Richard Tottel, the printer who enjoyed for decades the exclusive royal license to print books on the common law.

By the 1620s that distinction had gone but instead there was a link (albeit somewhat tenuous) with Shakespeare and his circle through the Jaggard family – famous both for its book-sales and its printing press.

Later in that century the site played host to Nando’s and the Rainbow, two of London’s most famous coffee houses in the era when these bright new establishments were the heart and soul of political, commercial and social life. This continued throughout the 18th century and by the end of the 19th century the Rainbow had been transformed into a seat of hot topical political debate involving some of the great names of the age.

Yet the Quadrant House site was not exclusively devoted to hospitality and entertainment. In fact, rather the contrary. By the latter stages of the 19th century the greater part of the space was occupied by the grand offices of the Legal and General insurance company and the Union Bank. These two institutions were the embodiments of Victorian values and their buildings still remain today as the core structures within Quadrant House. Moreover, back on that corner once occupied by the Hand and Star were the offices of the legal publisher Butterworths which renewed the tradition of Tottel and adopted the Hand and Star symbol as its logo.

The 20th century saw a period of transition. After the Second World War there is an up-and-down tale of change of use, abuse and neglect. The site needed an overhaul along with some love and care so as to find a new role for itself. That came, fortunately, at the start of the new century with the arrival of a barristers’ set which was deeply in need of a new home.

Quadrant Chambers has positioned itself as trail-blazing a new style of client-focused advocacy. It has an agenda for development which is at one with commercial realities and the expectations of its clients. Quadrant’s barristers are involved in some of the highest profile commercial cases not just in the London courts but around the world where English legal skills are valued. They build on chambers’ history which reaches back into the Temple but they also embody the drive to modernize and adapt to the demands of today’s City clients. Quadrant Chamber is now flourishing, drawing on both its own roots and that of its location in Fleet Street, the great thoroughfare of London’s history.

www.quadrantchambers.com


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Prologue: Understanding the Site

To understand the character and quality of Quadrant House it is critical to grasp the significance of its exact location. On Fleet Street and within a few steps from Temple Bar (now resurrected by St. Paul’s), it is at the western entry point to the City of London, and also within a stone’s throw of the Royal Courts of Justice. In other words it is on the sweet-spot intersection for anyone involved in law, commerce and the life of London.

Across the centuries Fleet Street has witnessed countless processions of monarchs, politicians and popular heroes from Edward 1st through to the TeamGB Olympians and Paralympians of 2012. It is the thoroughfare where people come to display and apply their intellectual wares. Famous once as the great home of the British press, it now hosts the world’s most powerful business bank.

So Fleet Street provides a microcosm of London in all its dynamic energy and history. And just on the nodal point where Chancery Lane meets Fleet Street, four distinct yet integrated buildings have been brought together to form 10-15 Fleet Street.

Like Quadrant Chambers, Quadrant House is diverse yet co-ordinated. Marked out by the natural boundaries of Temple Lane and Middle Temple Lane (to the east and west respectively) with Fleet Street the northern boundary and then the vacant space of Hare Court to the south, it is not a single office block. Instead it is made up of four principal ingredients which have been engineered together to create a structure which is modern, multi-faceted, multilateral and multi-structured.

In occupying a self-contained island site Quadrant House’s identity could not be clearer cut. However, within those parameters there has been a steady evolution of buildings and numbering systems. From the middle ages up to the early 19th century the site was made up of a series of smaller units. Hence the Fleet Street Tax Collectors’ Routes of 1790 shows a sequence of buildings from 6 to 15 between the two ‘Temple’ lanes with numbers 6 and 7 to the west of a small passage. This passage – which was to survive for centuries and cause endless issues of access – went down to what became Dick’s Coffee House. Meanwhile there were separate buildings behind the Fleet street frontage, notably the substantial building on the east side of the site known as the Rainbow.

Not surprisingly the ownership of the site was complicated especially in the north east corner where different floors had different owners in a fragmented and confusing way. All of this was swept away, however in the great building projects in the latter half of the 19th century which gives us the principal structures we see today.

As it stands now, the site is dominated by the two, grand Fleet Street-facing corporate buildings built to house the Legal & General insurance company and The Union Bank. Together they proclaim with Victorian gravitas a new style of commerce which set the course for the business world of today. But the context in which all of this happened was the practice of law which surrounded this site on all sides.

Consequently the final incorporation of Quadrant House into Middle Temple in 2003 was simply the culmination of the site’s natural vocation. By drawing together the three principal buildings into a single coherent whole the potential of this site as a place for lawyers to work could finally be realised.


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Quadrant House: The Building Blocks

The three principal structures which together make up Quadrant House today are:- the Legal and General site which is the largest block and lies at the west end fronting on to Fleet Street; it is characterized

by the wonderful waiting room still garnished with many Legal and General references- the Union Bank site which is just east of the Legal and General and also fronts on to Fleet Street- the Rainbow site which is behind the Union Bank and for which there used to be an entrance in Temple Lane; it is

distinguished today by its remarkable library

The fourth ingredient in the site is in the south west corner, historically the site of Dick’s coffee house.

The History

The Sense of Place

Quadrant House stands immediately to the east of the famous Temple Bar, the gate which came to mark the most western extremity of the City of London. It is a site of intense historic significance as the start of Fleet Street and the point by which monarchs would traditionally enter the City by road - not entirely sure sometimes of the welcome they would receive! Even today on the site of the Temple Bar the monarch must ask the Lord Mayor for permission to enter the City.

For many ordinary folk, however, the Temple Bar marked their access to the world of the lawyer. Just a few paces along Fleet Street they would reach Middle Temple Lane which ran down to the heart of Middle Temple where lawyers have congregated in droves since the 13th century. A little way beyond – passing in front of what is now Quadrant House - was to be found Temple Lane taking litigants down to what is now the Inner Temple. Since the days of Henry VIII the whole area – both Middle and Inner Temple - had belonged to the monarch until in 1609 James 1st transferred the ownership to the benchers of the respective Inns. From then on the Inns were formally established as being at the heart of legal London.

But our story is not immediately about the Temple - the Quadrant House space is more outward-looking than that. Occupying what was historically 7-15 Fleet Street it was where the outside world met the City of London; where the legal world met the business world; where hospitality came in a various forms and where people of intellectual interest engaged with each other. All of this remains true today.

To get a sense of the history of the site we must shift with time from side to side. But the basic outline of the enclosure can be seen to emerge deep in the medieval period. Some evidence of the early occupiers exist and hence in 1543 a shop was sold via a conveyance bearing the royal seal of Henry VIII to a certain Thomas Holbeck, a ‘citizen and haberdasher’. The natural starting point for our story lies, then, in the middle of the 16th century when the medieval era was at an end and when technology, geographical exploration, religious experimentation and increased literacy were all starting to shape a new culture. And at the heart of that culture was printing.

At the sign of ‘The Hand And Star’

The embodiment of dynamic change in the 16th century was the printing industry which was spreading ideas and learning in an unprecedented way. By 1553 Fleet Street and the adjacent area had already established itself as London’s centre of the printing and book-selling business. And, in particular, at the western corner of the Quadrant Chambers site – at the sign of the Hand and Star - the inter-related worlds of law, literature, printing and politics were all brought together by the god-father and presiding genius in this story – Richard Tottel the man who, for forty years during the Tudor period, held the exclusive license from the Government to print its statutes and year books.


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Brought up in the West Country, Tottel was apprenticed to a London printer, William Middleton who specialized in the printing law books. Upon the death of his master and following a certain amount of legal wrangling Tottel established his own printing business at the sign of the ‘Hand and Starre’. Somehow Tottel then pulled off the most extraordinary coup. In a manner still not entirely clear he secured from the Government of Edward VI on 12th April 1553 a monopoly on the printing and publishing of all authorized books dealing with common law. As the licence said, “None other shall imprint any book which the said Richard Tottel shall first take and imprint during the said term upon pain of forfeiture of all such books.”

The patent was originally awarded for seven years but Tottel clearly knew how to work the system because on Edward’s death in 1556, when the throne passed to his sister Mary, he managed to have the licence renewed. Then in 1559 with the arrival of Elizabeth as queen the licence was renewed for a second time – but this time for life. This was almost literally a license to print money and set the tone of the Quadrant space. If you wanted to know the law – whether student, scholar, lawyer or layperson – you had to make your way to the Hand and Star. At least 225 ‘Year Books’, the equivalent of Law Reports were printed by Tottel and he also printed statutes. Moreover he reprinted parts of the Year Books three or four times, thus keeping them in print.

Equally important in terms of long term significance, however, was that Tottel published Sir James Dyer’s seminal work ‘Collection of Cases’. Dyer (born in 1512) was the Chief Justice of the English Court of Common Pleas from 1559 and is notable for having conceived the modern system of reporting legal cases so that they could serve as precedents. Perhaps ironically, his method superseded the recording of cases in Year Books from which Richard Tottel derived so much financial benefit.

Unsurprisingly, maybe, as a monopolist Tottel became a controversial figure. According to a contemporary commentator he took full advantage of his patent by selling his law books at the Hand and Star “at excessive prices to the hindrance of a greater number of poor students.” (Some people might say that this sounds familiar.)

No doubt because of his status as the sole printer of legal texts Tottel had considerable standing in the City’s business printing community and so when the Stationers Company - originally established as a guild in 1403 - received its Royal Charter in 1557, Tottel was enrolled as the 67th of the original 94 members. Over the years Tottel would graduate through the various ranks of the Company from Warden to Upper Warden and on to Master from 1578 to 1584. Unfortunately his health was poor during the last decade of his life and he was forced to resign his office although it was clear that he remained a popular figure until his death in 1593.

The literary link

Tottel’s reputation was not built on his legal publishing alone. He also entered the field of literature selling works of poetry such as Lydgate’s ‘Fall of Princes’ and the ‘Songes and Sonnets’ of Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey (otherwise known as Tottel’s Miscellany). The latter was to turn into another popular money-spinner at a time when the reading of poetry was a mainstream cultural activity. Indeed Tottel’s ‘Songes and Sonnets’ was to make its mark on a generation of young writers. It reached its zenith, perhaps, a few years after its publication when it was name-checked as a must-have volume in Shakepeare’s ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ when Slender (the cousin to Shallow the country justice) declares “I had rather than forty shillings I had my Book of Songs and Sonnets here.” The first link, it might be said, between Shakespeare and the Hand and Star had been established.

Yet despite his eminence and excellent connections Tottel was not necessarily the printer of choice for the leading writers of the day. Indeed, once Tottel had seen their works through the presses they were less keen to use him again. This was most vividly expressed by the translator Jasper Heywood who, in the 1560s, went so far as to condemn Tottel’s slovenly printing in verse.

“For when to sign of Hand and Star


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I chanced first to comeTo printers’ hands I gave the workBy whom I had such wrongThat though myself perused their proofsThe first time, yet err longWhen I was gone, they would againThe print therof renew Corrupted all: in such a sorteThat scant a sentence trueAnd to the printer thus I said‘Within these doors of thineI make a vow shall never moreCome any work of mine’.”

Maybe it was the observation of clients’ dissatisfaction with his father’s work which persuaded Richard Tottel’s son, William, not to continue in the family business but to switch instead to enter a more salubrious trade – the law. In due course he qualified as a ‘Six Clerk in Chancery’ (a forerunner of the rank of solicitor) although that was not quite the end of his links with the Hand and Star.

Meanwhile the printing shop was taken over after Tottel’s death in 1594 by a certain Charles Yetsweirt who seems to have inherited also the patent for the legal printing. But his occupation was short-lived and by 1599 a new and highly significant name appears as proprietor of the Hand and Star business.

Enter the Jaggard Family – and a certain Mr. Shakespeare

John and William Jaggard came from an established family of printers and both were to make successful careers in the printing trade.

In his youth John had been apprenticed to Tottel so he knew the set-up at the Hand and Star very well. In 1591 he was admitted as a Freeman of the Stationers Company and for some time he worked with Yetsweirt finally taking over the business at the Hand and Star himself in 1599.

One of his earliest publications to appear under his own name was Giacomo di Grasso’s treatise on the new Italian methods of dueling ‘The True Art of Defence’ published in 1594 and it is not too fanciful to suggest that the influence of this work can be seen in Shakespeare’s plays including notably Romeo & Juliet, where Mercutio refers to the ‘immortal passado! the punto reverso!” as well as in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Love’s Labours Lost and Much Ado About Nothing where Italian dueling terms feature. Meanwhile in ‘Twelfth Night’ there is a farcical ‘duello’ between Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Viola, the heroine who was dressed (at the point in the play) as a man.

Unfortunately for John Jaggard he appears not to have ‘inherited’ the legal printing licence of his predecessors on the site although he did continue to be involved in legal printing. But he did gain an important contact in Sir Francis Bacon, who was one of the most distinguished politicians and lawyers of the Elizabethan age. Essayist, scientist, intellectual, politician as well as lawyer, Bacon became Attorney General and then Lord Chancellor and was granted the title of Lord Verulam before suffering career downfall and public humiliation in 1621 when he was exposed for having accepted bribes.

Prior to this fall, however, Bacon was highly successful and his steward – or business manager - was none other than William Tottel, the son of Richard Tottel who, despite pursuing the legal profession, had remained in contact with John


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Jaggard, his father’s former apprentice. So when a printer and bookseller was needed for Bacon’s prolific output of texts, William Tottel placed the work with the Jaggard family.

Unsurprisingly personal and family contacts were enormously important in the printing world at that time. Printing, publishing and selling books was an incestuous business and both John and William Jaggard moved between all three functions so that in some cases one would be the publisher and the other the printer or seller of a book or vice versa.

Hence, for example, the printing of Bacon’s Essays in 1612 and 1613 was undertaken on behalf of John Jaggard by his brother William whose printing press was at the sign of the ‘Half-Eagle and Key’ in the Barbican (an area remote from the book-selling trade which was based in Fleet Street and S. Paul’s Churchyard). Probably because of this connection Bacon interested himself in a petition which John Jaggard presented a few years later in 1618 on behalf of ‘the poor stationers of London’.

Just how poor they were is open to question but it possibly accounts for the rogue conduct in which many of them indulged. Hence one of William Jaggard’s early successes as a publisher was The Passionate Pilgrim (1597) which had been written, so Jaggard claimed, by the up-and coming poet and playwright William Shakespeare. It is very likely that the books were sold at the sign of the Hand and Star but, unfortunately, this was a classic example of the intellectual property abuses of the time.

In reality The Passionate Pilgrim contained just five poems actually written by Shakespeare himself. The rest were by lesser talents. Shakespeare, unsurprisingly was highly put out by having these less distinguished works attributed to him. According to a contemporary reports, Shakespeare was “much offended” with Jaggard for making “so bold with his name.” In due course William Jaggard acknowledged the complaint and removed the attribution in future editions.

What this little exchange demonstrates, however, is that William Jaggard knew the ‘marketability’ of works by Shakespeare and this was echoed a quarter of a century later with the printing in 1623 (seven years after Shakespeare’s death) of the First Folio of works by Shakepeare by a syndicate headed by William Jaggard. The plays themselves had been collected together by the actors John Heminge and Henry Condell but the involvement of the Jaggard family was critical.

By now William Jaggard was blind so the printing presses were largely in the hands of his son Isaac A total of about 1,000 copies of the First Folio were printed in the Barbican but there are suggestions that it was then sold at least partly from the Hand and Star. If so – and it must be said that there is no concrete evidence for this – it would have been the final book that John Jaggard sold because he died in the same year.

So in the course of the first thirty years of the 17th century the Quadrant site had enjoyed encounters with two of the greatest writers in the English language – Shakespeare and Bacon, Could there be more to come?

After the civil war, a cup of coffee

Over the Rainbow

The mid- and late-17th century was a time of enormous turbulence for England as the country was split first by the Civil War and then underwent great constitutional changes with the expulsion of James II and the arrival of William III. It was a time of great political debate which coincided with the rise of the London coffee house as a place where strong opinions could be expressed without the fear that inebriation would lead to violence (as was the tendency in ale houses).

The Quadrant House site was, again, a leader in the field with James Farr, originally a barber by trade, establishing what is believed to be the second coffee house in London under the title ‘The Rainbow’ at the eastern corner of the site in


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1652. For almost 250 years the name The Rainbow would be associated with this spot although the nature of the various establishments using that title and their exact location were to vary by a few yards as buildings were successively re-developed. In due course two other coffee houses – Nando’s and Dick’s – were also to be established on the Quadrant site.

The distinctive feature of the Rainbow was that it was set back a little from Fleet Street. As Mr. E. B. Price wrote in a paper for the British Archæological Association in the 19th century, “It has been frequently remarked by ‘tavern-goers,’ that many of our snuggest and most comfortable taverns are hidden from vulgar gaze, and unapproachable except through courts, blind alleys, or but half-lighted passages.”

Prior to the Civil War the Rainbow had, in fact, been like the Hand and Star, a bookshop (and maybe printing house) as well as a tavern. Hence the title-page of Trussell’s History of England, states it to be “printed by M. D., for Ephraim Dawson, and are to bee sold in Fleet Street, at the signe of the Rainbowe, neere the Inner-Temple Gate, 1636.”Curiously enough the Rainbow also acted as a kind of post restante where instructions for bail could be left by the authorities (presumably for the Tavern’s regulars). But it was the decision of James Farr to turn away from alcohol and towards caffeine which made an immediate impact – although not one which was entirely welcomed by the neighbours. Indeed in 1657 - five years after Farr converted to coffee - the NIMBYs living in the immediate area of the Rainbow could stand it no longer and, following a fire in the chimney of his coffee house, Farr was in the dock at the Wardmote Inquest. Under the heading ‘Disorders and Annoys’ (a useful category perhaps even today) the presentment reads, “Item, we pr’sent James Farr, barber for making and selling of a drink called coffee, whereby in making the same, he annoyeth his neighbours by evil smells and for keeping of fire for the most part day and night, whereby his chimney and chamber hath been set on fire, to the great danger and afrightment of his neighbours.”

All fired up

The momentum, however, was on the side of coffee and despite the neighbours’ indignation Farr was allowed to continue with his noxious practices.

The next few years featured the end of the Commonwealth and the return of the Stuart monarchy. But political debate was still extremely lively and in May 1666 Samuel Speed, a stationer and bookseller who (like my other trouble-makers in these turbulent times) appears to have based himself in the Rainbow was arrested on the charge of publishing and selling seditious books. Scarcely had the customers of the Rainbow recovered from this shock than, in September, the City was ablaze with the ‘Great Fire of London’. Luckily – and ironically, perhaps, given the fire in the house in 1657 – The Rainbow survived thanks to its being halted about one hundred yards further east along Fleet Street. It was a narrow escape and to commemorate the survival of the coffee house James Farr issued a token coin on which a rainbow is seen emerging from the clouds and on the reverse was the inscription by Farr “ His half-penny” reflecting a wider trend by coffee house keepers – and other businesses – to issue their own coins in order to make good the critical shortage of small change at this time.

So James Farr survived to serve another shot and indeed he continued to run the coffee house until his death in 1681. But coffee houses were still regarded as politically and socially suspect. So much so that in December 1675 there was a proclamation by the King, Charles II, calling for their suppression on the grounds that they were:

“The great resort of Idle and disaffected persons [which have] produced very evil and dangerous effects ; as well for that many tradesmen and others, do herein mispend much of their time, which might and probably would be employed in and about their Lawful Calling and Affairs ; but also, for that in such houses . . . divers false, malitious and scandalous reports are devised and spread abroad to the Defamation of his Majestie’s Government, and to the Disturbance of the Peace and Quiet of the Realm.”

The uproar which followed this proclamation, however, was so great that within a week the Government had withdrawn it and retired to lick its wounds. Who knows what would have happened had they not done so?


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Coffee houses; Nice but naughty

The curious feature of this campaign against the coffee houses was that they were generally portrayed as centres of sobriety by contrast with the taverns which they replaced. As one commentator observed in 1675, although it had become ”Almost a general custom amongst us, that no bargain can be drove, or business concluded between man and man, but it must be transacted at some public house” the supping of alcoholic drinks made the traders “drowsy and indisposed to business.” By contrast, “Having now the opportunity of a coffee house, they repair thither. Take each man a dish or two...and so dispatching their business go out more sprightly about their affairs than before.”

The trouble was, presumably, that while transacting business their sober discussions might have rolled on naturally to dangerous political debate. And that, probably, was at the heart of the Government’s desire to close them down. The public’s ferocious defence of the coffee house as a bastion of civil society meant that the security of the coffee house trade was no further in doubt. The coffee house, in other words, was now a centre of political power.

As evidence of this the career of perhaps the greatest patron of the Rainbow at this time is revealing. Sir Henry Blount was one of that band of extraordinary cosmopolitan characters thrown up in England as a result of the Civil War. Famous as a traveller, soldier, politician and writer his account of his journeys in the Levant - and especially the delight which the Turks took in coffee - lead him to be called ‘the father of English coffee-houses’. Strongly individual, his personal motto was “Loquen- dum est cum vulgo, sentiendum cum sapientibus” ( roughly translated as ‘The crowd may talk about it, the wise decide it’).

Arising out of his various political activities – and in his career he traversed the whole terrain from Royalist to Parliamentarian and back again – his regular attendance at the Rainbow made the coffee house a place of interest to the Government. In the febrile atmosphere of the age there were conspiracies believed to be exposed under every bed and certainly in every coffee house. This gave scope for freelance – and sometimes fraudulent - plot-hunters to scamper around town for what they might find.

Prominent among these was Thomas Dangerfield who targeted the Rainbow in 1679-80 where it was commonly known that ‘men of differing judgments crowd.’ Dangerfield was the author of the Meal-Tub plot (a fabricated conspiracy to prevent the accession of the Duke of York, the future James II). He visited the Rainbow every night until, so the record goes, a ‘quarrel took place’ and he was ejected most likely because he was recognized as a freelance Government spy.

Unsurprisingly then the Rainbow came top of Dangerfield’s list of ‘most factious houses’ when he turned his information over to the government. In particular the regular presence there of Sir Henry Blount was regarded as implicit evidence of its seditiousness given that Blount was also a member of the so-called Green Ribbon Club, a radical puritan organisation based in the King’s Head tavern just across Fleet Street on the corner with Chancery Lane.

Almost immediately after that scandal had died down the Rainbow was back in the news again as one of the haunts of the rabble-rousing Titus Oates, the fraudster who invented the so-called Papist Plot which led to the execution of fifteen innocent people.

Hacks and Quacks

Trouble, it seemed, just could not stay away from the Quadrant House site at a time when English society was still trying to get the legacy of the Civil War – with all its religious differences - out of its system. It was not all bad news though. While Titus Oates was hatching plots downstairs on one of the upper stories the ‘Fire Office’ was being established which, in due course, became the Phoenix insurance company (although whether that transmuted into the Phoenix Assurance Company is a matter of debate). In so doing a marker was put down for the direction which the site would take two centuries later as a centre for the financial services industry.


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After this, life settled into a less controversial pattern for the Rainbow. But it was clearly successful commercially and its role as a post restante for traders and people doing business in London became increasingly important. For those without business premises of their own the Rainbow was very convenient and in 1709-10 it was especially popular with quack doctors. “The Rainbow in particular I should have taken for a Quacks Hall or the parlour of some eminent mountebank,” said one account. It was also well-known as the place where the latest fashions should be seen with the Spectator reporting that ‘silver garters bucked below the knee’ were first observed there.

So throughout the rest of the eighteenth century the Rainbow remained popular. Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith, Reynolds, Garrick, Steele and Addison are all reported to have frequented it. In the 1780’s it appears to have been owned by Alexander Moncrieff, the grandfather of the dramatist. At that time the old coffee-room was described as having “A lofty bay-window, at the south end, looking into the Temple: and the room was separated from the kitchen only by a glazed partition: in the bay was the table for ‘the elders’. The house has long been a tavern; all the old rooms have been swept away, and a large and lofty dining-room erected in their place.”

Nonetheless towards the end of the century the Rainbow seems to have dropped out of fashion. This was by no means the end of the story, however, for it was to come storming back in the 1820s having reverted to its original role as a tavern. And in the mid-19th century it was given a whole new lease of life.

Nodding off at Nando’s

In the meantime the Rainbow’s immediate neighbour, Nando’s coffee house, was also doing very well. The exact location of Nando’s has been much debated amongst the historians of Fleet Street. It seems to have been located in the same building as the Rainbow or adjacent to it – maybe on the northeast corner of the site fronting on to Fleet Street with the Rainbow behind it accessed from Temple Lane. But what is certain from documentary evidence is that it lay ‘between the two Temple Gates’ putting it firmly on the Quadrant House site.

Although we cannot be sure of the date when Nando’s first opened for customers we do know that in 1696 one quarter of the house was conveyed to the trustees of the Free School in Hampton (Middlesex) ‘for the maintenance of an able schoolmaster to teach the Latin tongue’ in accordance with the provisions of the will of a certain John Jones of Hampton. It must have been quite a valuable asset with its popularity being underlined by the decision of the newspaper Post Boy to put up its Postscripts – in effect ‘Late News’ - each day in Nando’s after the main newspaper had been printed. By 1709 the Evening Post was being sold at Nando’s and it appears that a bookseller, Bernard Lintot, had opened up next door. Meanwhile – rather like the Rainbow – various medical men used the coffee house as the place to meet their clients.

Clearly the establishment was a landmark building on Fleet Street and over the following years it is regularly cited as the place to buy tickets for theatrical performances, exchange information or even be picked up by coach to go to a dancing school as appeared in an advertisement in The Tatler in June 1710. In connection with the latter this advice was given to gentlemen: ‘Dancing shoes not exceeding four inches in height in the heel, and periwigs not exceeding three feet in length, are carried in the coach box gratis.’

Again we see coffee houses being used as a venue where communications can be left and collected. For example, in 1729 Nando’s was cited in connection with a request for information by Benjamin Pyne, Beadle at Goldsmith’s Hall about stolen goods. Notice of having found the items – mostly silver forks – was to be left with Master John Shank, the longtime proprietor of Nando’s.

Thurlow’s good fortune -------

By mid-century Nando’s was a regular haunt of lawyers and it played a critical role in the career of Edward Thurlow (1731-


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1806) who was to go on to become Lord Chancellor and First Baron Thurlow. In his earlier years as a schoolboy and undergraduate he was notoriously idle, his favorite occupation as he grew older being to flirt with the ladies. In the words of the time he was described as being ‘never a hard student’ and, once he became a barrister, he spent most of his time either in his chambers in the Inner Temple or, in the evenings, in Nando’s.

Fortune, nonetheless, was on his side. In 1767 one of the most high profile cases in the public consciousness was Douglas v. Hamilton, concerning succession to the Douglas estate, which was being heard in the Court of Session. The case was heavily reliant on circumstantial evidence and naturally there was much discussion about it in Nando’s amongst the lawyers. Thurlow had been following the matter in some detail and expressed strong views to the assembled company - with arguments to back them up - that the decision had gone the wrong way. In an odd quirk of fate his peroration was overheard by some of the appellants’ agents and this led to him being retained for the appeal. However the affair took a surprising turn when Thurlow was then required to fight a duel in Hyde Park with the Duke of Hamilton’s agent, Andrew Stuart, who had demanded satisfaction following some tart remarks that Thurlow had made upon his conduct! But it all ended well. Thurlow survived the duel and the House of Lords reversed the decision of the Court of Session.

With his reputation made made, Thurlow returned, no doubt, to Nando’s to celebrate his success not least because, so it was commonly expressed, the bar-maid was his ‘cher ami’. Indeed so much so that it is understood that she bore him two children and was, in fact, his wife.

A couple of years later Thurlow had been elected to the House of Commons and his first reported speech concerned the expulsion from Parliament of John Wilkes, the radical politician. This was a very hot political matter since Wilkes sharply divided opinion with passionate supporters as well as opponents. So passionate in fact that a physical clash took place at Temple Bar with the result that bystanders were forced to take shelter in Nando’s from the battling mob. The coffee house then featured in the subsequent prints of ‘The Battle of Temple Bar’ which appeared in the London Magazine in 1769.

The relationship between Nando’s and the activities of the court grew ever stronger towards the end of the eighteenth century so that in The Pleader’s Guide, a poem by Anstey, the lines run:“Alas how low his pocket grows!He cruises oft at Will’s or Joe’sAnd oft, as many a greater man does,Eats, drinks, and falls asleep at Nando’s.”

By 1793 lawyers were clearly the dominant group amongst the clientele leading Roach’s London Pocket Pilot to comment that, “In this coffee house assemble the most disagreeable class of people on earth, namely the Attornies.”

The Rainbow Returns

From 1800 Nando’s seems to have disappeared from view while the Rainbow’s reputation gradually resurfaced and by the time we get to the mid-19th century the Rainbow is ready to be resplendent once more, having been redeveloped – in common with the whole of the Quadrant House site - into the form we see today. Fortunately we have a detailed account of the Rainbow in its new guise from the magazine The Building News which in December 1860 announced that “the old hostelry, with all its interesting associations, has been entirely modernised to suit the progressive wants of the age, in a style of splendor, as regards elaborate embellishments, including moulded work in relief and polychromy, probably yet unsurpassed in the metropolis.” The ‘peculiar system’ of colored decoration based on the Kleuze School of Munich was introduced while “the dining rooms and smoking rooms on the first floor of the establishment [were decorated] in a very chaste and beautiful manner.” In short, the spirit of progressive, enlightened building was already in the air for Quadrant House more than 150 years ago.


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The proprietor of the site by this point was Wm. Smith Esquire and as the trade press made clear no expense was being spared. “As may be supposed, in the construction of a building for a special purpose, a large amount has been expended. We are assured that the cost including the site will ultimately exceed £20,000.”

A superb coffee room -----

The architect was Rawlinson Parkinson of 1 Raquet Court, while the builder was a certain Mr. Watson from Holloway. Together they had produced a result which drew admiration from The Building News which devoted an article to the renovation of The Rainbow in December 1860. In what can only be described as the most gushing terms it lavished praise upon every aspect of its elaborate decoration and extraordinary craftsmanship. Standing out on the ground floor was the ‘superb coffee room’ – now the Quadrant Chambers library/meeting room – described as “somewhat irregular in plan necessitated by the peculiar form of the site…..Its ceiling is divided into fourteen sunken panels by molded beams, elaborately decorated with bold pilaster enrichments, representing fruit, flowers and leafage.”

Decoration was central to the whole concept of the new Rainbow and Parkinson had brought in as painter–decorator Mr Sang who was a frequent exhibitor at the Royal Academy and had worked amongst other prestigious clients for the Marquis of Salisbury at Hatfield.

The Rainbow’s staircase also attracted great admiration “having niches for statues or groups inserted in its walls. Which are admirably painted by Goodwin in imitation of various marbles.”

On the first floor there was a dining room and a coffee room with high ceilings while on the second floor “There are five private sitting or busies rooms, some of which are specially adapted for legal gentlemen in the settling of arbitration matters or other disputed cases.”

Finally at the top of the building was – and is still is to be seen – the kitchen which had “an open louvre-formed roof, admirably ventilated, extremely light, and of course infinitely more cheerful and healthy than a kitchen buried in the basement of a building….. The kitchen ranges and hot water steam pipes and lifts are all of excellent workmanship.” The paneling of the entrance from Fleet Street was complimented while the floors of the passage and vestibule at the bottom of the staircase were laid with encaustic tiles in geometric pattern. The only defect in the whole establishment was the passage from Fleet Street which was so narrow that the journalist expressed the hope that at some point in the future it might be possible for the owners to purchase also the adjoining property “so as to obtain a spacious approach worthy of the splendid interior of the tavern.”

The lawyers’ resort

Alas, of course, that expansion never happened. Instead the it was necessary to install an ingenious sunken tram or railway along the centre of the passage for the taking in of ale, wines and coals while a system of hoists was introduced for lifting heavy goods to the upper stories.

The investment was well worthwhile. The manager of the modernized Rainbow was a Mr John Argent and the press heartily wished him “All the success that his energy and anxious desire to please his customers deserves.” Over the next decades the establishment flourished and in 1898 The Pall Mall Gazette was reporting that “During the luncheon hour the Rainbow does a fine trade. There is a cluster around the bar of journalists and others but the men who eat at the tables are chiefly barristers or solicitors who have chosen to dine at a restaurant instead of their clubs to talk business freely with their clients.”


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The article reported that “All the great judges have at some time in their careers eaten mutton at the Rainbow – Broughan and Eldon, amongst others; and the modern men of note use the place too, for the late Sir Frank Lockwood lunched at the Rainbow on the last occasion he appeared in the Courts.

“Frequently it happens that the parties on both sides in some big law suit are lunching at adjacent tables , and probably more cases have been arranged out of court in the smoking room on the first floor, with its lounges of thick green leather and its exceptionally comfortable armchairs, than in any room in a London restaurant.”

Politics and decline again

A sign of the Rainbow’s importance was that it provided the base in 1894 for the setting up of the ‘Rainbow Circle’, a political and social discussion group which met regularly in London between 1894 and 1931. Originally a caucus of the National Liberal Club, the Circle presumably came to adopt the Rainbow as its home, albeit relatively briefly, in order to attract a broader membership.

Among its founding members were its first secretary, J. Ramsay MacDonald, John Atkinson Hobson, the social theorist, economist, and journalist and William Clarke, the Fabian essayist and journalist and it was to become a hothouse of debate about early ideas about the welfare state and a generally progressive agenda.

After a year however the Circle moved on – whilst retaining its name - to the house of a wealthy member perhaps because it wanted greater privacy for its discussions. Even at this late date though there was still a coffee shop – Grooms which might have taken over from Nando’s – in the north east corner of the site so that entry to the Rainbow was still via the long thin passage – known as the rifle gallery by that point – with the result that “a fat man requires the whole available width for himself.”

With the advance of the 20th century the Rainbow seems, once more to lose its lustre and it suffered after the Second World War as its immediate neighbours became progressively run down. In due course it was closed though the internal splendour of its architectural features remained. What it was waiting for was the arrival of Quadrant Chambers to restore it to its historic glory.

Back to Books: Dick’s and Butterworths

Meanwhile what had been happening back at the northwest corner of the site? How had the Hand and Star (at No.7 Fleet Street) and its neighbour (No 8 which lay behind it down a narrow passage) fared?The same theme emerges as elsewhere on the site - books and coffee.During the late 17th century at No 8 Fleet Street a coffee house trading under the name Dick’s was to flourish. Started in 1680 by Richard Torner, or Turner - and hence the name – it seems to have enjoyed popularity with the legal fraternity. By and large, however, it seems to have kept a lower profile than the Rainbow or Nando’s. Nonetheless it did shoot into the public’s interest when a drawing of its interior was engraved as a frontispiece to a drama, called The Coffee-house by the Rev. James Miller, performed at Drury-lane Theatre in 1737. Apparently the play met with great opposition because use of the engraving - an early example maybe of breach of privacy! – seemed to imply that the characters in the play were based on the two women – a Mrs. Yarrow and her daughter - who kept Dick’s.Those involved in the play’s production and publicity could not have made a bigger error. Dick’s landlady and her daughter were “the reigning toast of the Templars, who then frequented Dick’s.” These Templars – Dick’s loyal clientele - took such deep umbrage on behalf of the Yarrows, mother and daughter that they, apparently, united to condemn the farce on the night of its production. Not only that but they continued to take issue with everything that the unfortunate Rev. Miller wrote from then onwards. Thereafter life at Dick’s seems to have continued pretty uneventfully for the next century or so and its entrance is still clearly visible adjacent to the offices of Henry Butterworth in an engraving of 1850.


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Meanwhile the records for No 7 are pretty scanty but it seems that from the end of the Jaggard days in the 1620s until 1779 the site hosted a succession of law printers and publisher. Then for a period of 40 years it became a haberdasher’s (a reminder of that lease under Henry VIII) before returning in 1818 to its true vocation as a printing house for the legal world. In short, Henry Butterworth had arrived! Butterworth (born 1786) had left his home in Coventry at age 14 to seek his fortune and a year later he joined his uncle’s law publishing business in London at 43, Fleet Street. The expectation was that he would take a share in the business but it did not work out. So instead in 1818, in his early 30s, Henry Butterworth set up his own business. As the firm’s official history put it, “He acquired a lease of the historic premises at 7 Fleet Street, formerly the Hand and Star, and so associated himself with a tradition dating from at least Edward VI’s reign.” Certainly part of the appeal of the site to the business was the link to Richard Tottel. In fact, the firm’s logo was a direct reproduction of the historic hand and star image used by the Tudor printer.

As the firm’s first advertisement, posted from 7 Fleet Street, put it: “In addition to an extensive collection of the best legal publications new and second hand, he intends to keep an assortment of the most approved Works of Miscellaneous literature in various appropriate bindings.”

Another royal connection

In the early years of the business Butterworth experienced al the usual problems – being accused of ‘piracy’, promising the publication of law books which never appeared, suffering the theft of vast amounts of expensive paper. But Butterworth persevered and prospered. By 1843 the list of books published by the firm extended to eight pages. Seven years later in 1850 it had grown to sixteen pages. And in 1852 Mssrs. Butterworth had become ‘Law Booksellers and Publishers to the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty’. The mantel of Richard Tottel, in other words, had once more descended on 7, Fleet Street.

(In the same year, interestingly enough, Butterworths offices provided a viewing gallery to the tightly controlled Funeral procession of the Duke of Wellington along Fleet Street. Those lucky enough to be invited to observe were given a special pass for showing to the police).

Henrry Butterworth continued to grow the business until his death in 1860. He was then succeeded by his son Joshua who made very few changes and the firm remained at 7 Fleet Street until 1895 when Joshua died having previously instructed that the business should be sold on his death. It was quickly picked up by the firm Shaw & Sons, printers and publisher of Fetter Lane. The Shaws were to remain at 7, Fleet Street until the turn of the century and then removed it to smaller premises at 12, Bell Yard. 7 Fleet Street was then occupied by the law publishing business of William Clowes & Son until the building was demolished in 1907.

At that point the site of No 7 was incorporated into the adjacent Legal & General building which had been progressively expanding since the 1830s. The principal structures as we know it today were starting to solidify.

Legal & General sets up shop

In the years between 1855 and 1886 the central portion of the Quadrant House site was transformed by the construction of two major buildings which embodied the surge in prosperity in Victorian England. They also represented the establishment of the financial services industry in a form which is still recognizable today. Indeed it is no coincidence that the institutions which occupied these two major buildings throughout the second half of the 19th century have survived (one under a new name) and remain household names.

The Legal & General assurance company was conceived in June 1836 by six lawyers. They were chaired by Mr Sergeant John Adams, a sergeant-at-law who was an assistant judge at the Middlesex Quarter Sessions - and the idea was


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crystallized, it appears, in a Fleet Street coffee house. (The official company history speculates that it was in Dick’s coffee house – in other words on the very site where the office was subsequently to be built).

The legal formalities were handled by a lawyer, Mr John Stable, at 18 Lincoln’s Inn Fields who became the Society’s solicitor. His biggest initial difficulty was over its name. The first choice ‘The New Law Life Assurance Society’ was quickly abandoned in favour of the ‘New Law and General Life Assurance Society’ perhaps in order to widen its appeal. Unfortunately this faced objections from the Law Life Assurance Society. So at last a solution was agreed – ‘The Legal and General Life Assurance Society’ was born.

The prospectus invited “all the different branches of the legal profession to become proprietors of the capital stock” and it rapidly attracted much interest. The business actually got going within a matter of months from the offices of Mr Stable in Lincoln Inn Fields and then in a temporary office at 10, Chancery Lane. (The first policy holder was a solicitor, Mr Thomas Smith of Furnival Inn). But meanwhile John Stable was searching for appropriate accommodation and to his satisfaction he was able to secure Nos11-12 Fleet Street.

In effect these were two shops in a ‘worn out’ state stretching right back from Fleet Street to Hare Court. Because of their dilapidation it was decided to undertake new building works and in October 1836 Thomas Hopper was appointed as architect. Just over eighteen months later the society was starting to buy furniture and in September 1838 the freehold of the site was assigned. The society’s first logo then featured the Temple Bar as symbolic of where it stood in the world.

Thomas Hopper (1776–1856) was a smart society architect who had enjoyed the favour of King George IV. He was particularly noted for his work on country houses across southern England. In London his best known building today is the Carlton Club and his design for the Legal & General was along very similar lines except that it was to incorporate a shop entrance for the Society on the ground floor. The building was to feature in the Tallis Street Views of London, a famous collection of illustration of London commercial and other buildings.

However, the Hoper building was not to stay intact for very long. In 1879 Legal & General expanded to incorporate also 9 Fleet Street which included, inconveniently, the entrance to Dick’s coffee house. It was then decided to take the opportunity to start integrating the various buildings into a common frontage. This was to usher in a period of twenty years’ continuous re-building of the site as Legal & General progressively expanded absorbing its neighbours until it reached its current condition.

The Edis Building

The lawyers must have done very well out of all this redevelopment because the intricate nature of the site with its various rights of way – not least to Dick’s – made it highly complicated. Nonetheless the shaping spirit was Sir Robert Edis whose 1886 building set the look and feel for what followed.

Sir Robert Edis (1839-1927) was one of the leading architect’s of his era and his Legal & General designs featured amongst the regular exhibits of his work at the Royal Academy. He was best known perhaps for his promotion of the Queen Anne Style but his work included 100 Piccadilly (1883), the Constitutional Club (1884) and the Grand Central Railway Hotel, Marylebone Station (1897-99). He also worked on the alterations to Liverpool Street Station Hotel (ca 1901) and was the architect of Glasgow’s Conservative Club (1893-4). Not only was he a designer but also a writer and his book Decoration and Furniture of Town Houses was published in 1881. To crown his career he was knighted at the age of eighty in 1919.

Edis’s façade for the Legal & General building was described in the professional press as being “very rich and effective” with red bricks and terra cotta dressings which could be easily cleaned. The interior, meanwhile, was regarded as being very competent but probably assembled largely from ‘catalogue items’ – such as the faience or staircase balustrades – rather then having been specially designed for the client. Nonetheless the historians have commented that “in both decoration and structure” the building is a good example of the work of ‘one of late Victorian England’s leading architects.”


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The most outstanding internal feature was regarded as being the ground floor front – complete with a fine chimney place with L&G tile – but it must be remembered that when constructed the original entrance was from the east. The other outstanding design and decoration elements are in the Board Room at the back of the ground floor, looking out on Hare Court. Interestingly Edis was also very preoccupied, following the great Paris fire of 1871, with fire safety and his buildings show a strong emphasis on fireproofing including the use of ‘filler joist floors’. One of the perennial problems of the building, however, was its entry area since in 1886 Dick’s coffee house was still functioning and access to it had to be maintained. This was a constant issue with the coffee shop customers effectively passing through the premises to reach Dick’s. However, by 1899 the Legal and General had purchased the former Butterworth’s shop and new building work commenced a little time later to pull together numbers 7, 8, 9, and 10 Fleet Street into a common frontage. Meanwhile the passage to Dicks was relocated to the western end of the site (where it remains today as a safe haven for bicycles).

So the Legal and General Building had now reached the configuration we see today. It would take another hundred years, however, before it would get the make-over to bring it up to the standard required for Quadrant Chambers.

The Union Bank Site

Meanwhile what had been going on further east at Nos 13 and 14 Fleet Street? On a lesser scale it parallels the Legal & General story. By the mid-18th century the site consisted of two shops, both probably timber-framed. Little seems to have changed by the mid-1850’s when the site came to the attention of the fast-expanding Union Bank. Founded in 1839 – within months of the Legal & General – the Union Bank had its first headquarters in Moorgate Street (soon moved to Princes Street) and was one of just five joint-stock banks operating in London in the middle of the century. Keen to expand throughout London’s commercial districts it became seriously interested in the Temple Bar end of Fleet Street following the earlier failure of a bank in the area This was exactly the opportunity that the Union Bank was looking for and negotiations were opened into a purchase of the two shops.

In common with the rest of the island site, however, there were problems over the various leases some of which stretched back over many years. Moreover, as with their neighbours at Nos. 11-12 twenty years earlier, the structures were in a very poor condition. Money was thrown at the problem and having secured a workable legal arrangement the Bank moved ahead with its plans to bring down the dilapidated buildings and erect their own new premises.

George Aitchison was appointed as architect and by 1857 – amazingly quickly – the final payment for construction were made. Aitchison (1825-1910) is best known as the architect of the extraordinary Leighton House which he designed in 1864, just six years after his work on the Union Bank Building. He was a personal friend of Lord Leighton and was to go on in later life to become the president of the RIBA and be awarded its Gold medal. His portrait was painted by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

Aitchison’s distinctive talent lay in producing elegant and somewhat exotic interiors. Although he was still early in his career when he designed the Union Bank there are some hints of his capabilities and interests especially in its staircase and oval landings. The building has been complimented for “bringing the palazzo style into the architectural vocabulary of the new joint stock banks.”

Unlike the neighbouring Legal & General building the footprint and look of the Union Bank building has remained pretty much the same until the point when it was incorporated into Quadrant House. The bank itself, however, changed substantially as the banking sector progressively expanded during the 19th century and then consolidated through the 20th century. By 1902 there were 24 branches of the Union Bank in London and its suburbs. From this strong base in the south it then amalgamated with Smith, Payne & Smiths of London and Samuel Smiths (strong in the midlands and the north) to


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create the Union of London & Smiths Bank Ltd.

Thereafter it was successively folded into National Provincial & Union Bank of England Ltd which became the National Provincial Bank Ltd in 1924 and subsequently the National Westminster Bank Ltd in 1968. By 1990 it was commonly known as the NatWest.

The biggest irony of all however came at the end of the 1990’s when there were serious discussions about a merger between the NatWest and the Legal & General (thereby uniting these two Fleet Street neighbours from the 19th century). In the event the negotiation proved abortive and, instead, the NatWest joined the Royal Bank of Scotland Group as part of the Scottish bank’s massive expansion strategy. In the light of the financial crisis of 2008 one wonders what might have happened alternatively had the Legal & General deal come off!

The Final Years

By the time of these events, of course, both Legal & General and the NatWest had long departed – the Legal & General to its new headquarters near London Wall (not too far away, in fact, from where that First Folio of Shakespeare had been printed) while the NatWest was in smart modern branches elsewhere in the area.

Meanwhile the fine buildings designed by George Aitchison and Sir Robert Edis were empty and decaying following a number of years of neglect, sub-letting and multi-use by a number of businesses.

These final years of occupation are an object lesson in the problems faced by outstanding Victorian buildings which were not suited to the demands of modern commercial life. Without major overhaul they were nothing but a source of frustration to the tenants.

By the second half of the twentieth century the buildings had been sliced up and sub-divided into various suites of offices. The London Trustee Savings Bank had is headquarters at Nos. 7-14 Fleet Street. The Trustee Savings Bank Fleet Street Branch had the banking hall – originally that of the Union Bank – while other occupants included the City Parochial Charities, the Esmee Fairbairn Trust and Mathys and Squire, the chartered patent agents. But the major occupant was the law firm Masons – now Pinsent Masons – which arrived in 1977 with a 24 year lease.

Martin Roberts, now the Head of Pinsent Masons London office, actually started work with the firm on the day it took over the premises. At that time the firm had just seven partners and the move was largely a do-it-yourself job from its previous accommodation in Chancery Lane. But the firm was growing, ambitious and quickly increased to ten partners as a result of demand for its specialist expertise in construction law. The story constantly during it period of occupation was the need for more accommodation and there were frequent negotiations with the other tenants to secure further office space. Having originally had its reception on the first floor it was an important step to be able to move down in due course to take over the whole of the ground floor. “We even took over the basement as well which included a tunnel under Fleet Street for document storage,” recalls Martin Roberts.

The ownership of Nos. 7-10 continued, however, to be in the hands of Legal & General. It is obvious, however, that the state of the building was becoming dire. The electrics in particular were a danger with the fire brigade having to be summoned more than once. “I spoke to the senior fire officer, “reported the Masons partner in charge of the situation, “who said that we had a very lucky escape and that it could possibly have caused a major fire. There must be a leak in the roof and water was running down the conduit. The carpet was very wet.”

As a sign of the times it took thirty telephone calls before an electrician could be found to make the building safe – and he then had to be paid in cash by the partner out of his own pocket. (“I would be grateful if Jackie could obtain reimbursement


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for me from the petty cash,” he wrote).

As well as the fire danger there were complaints about the lift “which sticks at the second floor and is clearly approaching the end of its useful life” as well as the poor “general state of repair and decoration”

In an attempt to get a grip on the situation Masons were keen to re-negotiate their lease with a view to redevelopment. However the correspondence makes it clear that Legal & General’s priorities were elsewhere although it was claimed that, “A definite decision has been made by L&G to redevelop in 1991.”

To underline the increasingly wretched state of the building there is the evidence provided by Mathys & Squire which in 1985 argued against an ‘unrealistic and unfair’ rental valuation on the grounds that there were “extensive leaks to the roof…about which repeated complaints to the landlords have had no long term effect; windows in a very poor state, ill-fitting and drafty; poor decoration...the general effect is an air of dinginess; the entrance hall being rarely without junk; the lift dirty and damaged; and the heating unreliable.”

Ferdinand the Ferret Saves the Day

Perhaps the most unpleasant aspect of the building was what Mark Roberts describes as ‘a vermin issue’. This was most apparent in the basement area and in order to deal with it the firm recruited a new specialist member of staff who could focus on the problem. ‘Ferdinand the Ferret’ – yes, it really was a ferret – played a vital role in making 7-10 Fleet Street viable as a working office. Each evening at 6.00 it would patrol the basement area having been confined in its cage in the western passageway during the day.

So this was the state of the accommodation of prestigious professional service firms in a key part of the City just a year before ‘Big Bang’. No wonder things had to change. Indeed in what looks like a crisis meeting convened by the Masons partners in March 1986 the view was expressed that “Rents in the vicinity of our premises would grow very significantly in the foreseeable future. However, this does not suggest a significant premium for our premises because of their condition and layout.”

With the expiry of its lease in 1991 Masons moved out – probably with some relief - leaving behind it a building which then entered a downward spiral of decay. It was a blot on the face of Fleet Street when all around it was upgrading and modernising.

Thereafter the building remained unoccupied for years. Abandoned virtually as a wasting asset by its owners, it was to take another decade before the Middle Temple moved decisively to secure and restore the building to its new, current glory.

The new era of Quadrant Chambers was about to open.


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