Living over the shop in the City of London

Extract

John Stow the historian, writing in the 1590s about his own neighbourhood, described ‘a frame of three fayre houses, set up in the year 1590 on the high streete’, that is, what was then part of Aldgate High Street but soon to be called Leadenhall Street, ‘between Billiter lane and Lyme streete’, that is, on the south side. The way from the Royal Exchange to Aldgate along Cornhill and Leadenhall Street is one of the most ancient principal ways of the City. The site of the three houses, now of an office building called Baltic House, lies almost opposite the church of St Andrew Undershaft.