New discovery solves mystery of the location of Shakespeare's London
house
[April 16, 2026]
By JILL LAWLESS
LONDON (AP) — Fans of William Shakespeare know that the great playwright
came from Stratford-upon-Avon, the riverside English town where tourists
still throng to see his childhood home.
But he made his name in London — though few traces of him remain in the
British capital.
A newly discovered 17th-century map sheds new light on the Bard’s London
life, pinpointing for the first time the exact location of the only home
Shakespeare bought in the city, and where he may have worked on his
final plays.
Shakespeare scholar Lucy Munro, who found the document, said that it
supplies “extra bits of the jigsaw puzzle” of Shakespeare's life. And as
with so many discoveries, it was partly due to luck.
“I came across it in the London Archives when I was looking for other
things," Munro said.
New evidence of the building's location
Historians have long known that Shakespeare bought property in 1613 near
the Blackfriars Theatre, but the exact location was a mystery. A plaque
on a 19th-century building records only that the playwright had lodgings
“near this site.”
A plan of the Blackfriars precinct found by Munro and disclosed Thursday
by King's College London shows in detail Shakespeare’s house, a
substantial L-shaped dwelling carved from a former medieval monastery,
including its gatehouse.
The 13th-century Dominican friary had been redeveloped for more secular
uses after the dissolution of the monasteries by King Henry VIII in the
mid-16th century. The precinct included the Blackfriars playhouse, which
Shakespeare part-owned.
Munro, professor of Shakespeare and early modern literature at King’s
College London, said it was a desirable area moving slightly down-market
– due to people like Shakespeare, who was affluent but associated with
the slightly déclassé world of the stage.
“After the dissolution of the monasteries, a lot of the nobility, quite
high-ranking courtiers, court officials are living in the Blackfriars,”
Munro said. By the time Shakespeare bought his property, “there are
still a lot of important people living there, people who make protests
against the playhouses at various points, because they see the
playhouses as a bit of a public nuisance.”
Shakespeare used the profits of his plays to build a fine family house,
now demolished, in Stratford, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) northwest
of London. He died there in 1616 at the age of 52.
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A plaque erected by the City of London to commemorate where William
Shakespeare lived on a wall, top right, is pictured in London,
Wednesday, April 15, 2026, he purchased lodgings in the Blackfriars
Gatehouse, which was located close by. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
 It’s not certain whether Shakespeare
lived in his London property or just rented it out. But Munro said
that the size of the house and its location a five-minute walk from
the Blackfriars Theatre suggest he may have spent more time in
London toward the end of his life than is widely assumed. She said
that he may have worked here on his final plays, “Henry VIII” and
“The Two Noble Kinsmen,” both co-written with John Fletcher.
Will Tosh, director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe — a
reconstruction of the open-air Elizabethan playhouse where many of
the Bard’s plays were first performed — said that Munro’s discovery
provides a “dazzling new sense of Shakespeare the London writer.
She’s helped us to understand how much the city meant to our
greatest ever dramatist, as a professional and personal home.”
Destroyed in the Great Fire
Shakespeare left the property to his daughter Susanna, and it
remained in the family for another half-century. Munro also found
two archival documents detailing its sale by the playwright’s
granddaughter Elizabeth Hall Nash Barnard in 1665. A year later, the
building burned to the ground in the Great Fire of London, which
destroyed much of the medieval city.
Only a few remnants of Shakespeare’s London remain in the area, now
part of the city's financial district, including a fragment of wall
from the medieval friary. Nearby, the name Playhouse Yard is a
reminder that a theater once stood here.
And visitors can have a pint in the Cockpit pub across the street
from the site of Shakespeare’s house. The 1600s map shows it as a
building called the Sign of the Cock, likely a tavern. It’s not
difficult to imagine Shakespeare and his colleagues carousing there.
“There are certainly complaints in the period about the playhouses
leading to the opening of more and more drinking houses — ‘houses
for tippling,’ as they call them in one of the documents I was
looking at,” Munro said.
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