This alley just to the south of Fleet Street sits on land that was once owned by the Bishop of Salisbury, and later became part of the printing revolution, and today is mainly just a gap between two modern offices.
The area has strong literary links, with the author Samuel Pepys born somewhere around here, and later another Samuel, Samuel Richardson, was both a writer and a property developer who was partially responsible for the area’s development in the mid-18th century, replacing older buildings around the alley with printing offices and warehouses.
The alley was originally called Half Paved Court, and was a narrow passage running between the backs of buildings.
R Horwood map 1799
However, in the 1890s, the block of smaller buildings to the south was cleared and replaced with a single large building that housed a printing works, and it was then that Dorset Buildings emerged as an open-air dead-end passageway.
WWII left a deep mark on the area, completely destroying the printing works but leaving the buildings on the north side of the alley untouched. The ruins were later rebuilt in the late 1950s as Kildare House by Trollope & Colls.
OS map 1968
Persons of a certain age may remember a long-running advertising campaign challenging people to tell the difference between butter and Stork Margarine. Well, if you wanted to take the challenge, you sent your application to an office in Kildare House.
In the middle of the 1980s, the building was stripped back to its core frame and reclad with the very 1980s style marble facade that it now retains.
The north side of the alley, having survived WWII, didn’t survive modernisation, and in the early 1980s, the current office block was erected, designed by the architects T. P. Bennett and Sons to replace the older buildings, which dated from 1908-1910.
So the alley today is lined with two very 1980s-style office blocks, leading to a delivery yard.
Although hemmed in by offices, it’s surprisingly well lit, as the far end opens up to a lot of daylight. That’s thanks to a somewhat curious void between the offices and a neighbouring hotel, which surely should have been turned into a garden for office workers by now.
But it hasn’t. So it sits there looking not unlike an abandoned ruin that the city used to be filled with, waiting for someone to do something with it.
At the far end, the narrow brick building, looking very out of place surrounded by modern offices, is actually the back of the St Bride Foundation. With a tiny slice of passage alongside leading to a curiously odd termination, it also has the air of an unfinished work about it.
There is something down here that’s worth seeking out – the railings.
It’s been impossible to work out who designed them, although there is a suggestion that the inserts made from a different metal could be old printers’ quoins from the days when newspaper pages were laid out by compositors using metal letters.
Probably dating back to when the office block was refurbished in the 1980s. But a lot of hunting has been unable to uncover the name of the artist who created them.
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