Three of my father’s photos in today’s post, which goes by the title of “The Gates of Stationers’ Hall – Perhaps”.

The reason for “Perhaps” at the end of the title is that I am still not completely sure that I have found the right location, but, as I will explain in the post, I cannot find any other location for the photo.

Each of the three photos are looking through some ornate iron gates, or railings, with part of St. Paul’s Cathedral in the background, with the twin towers on either side of the western entrance to the cathedral and the dome providing a clear landmark:

In the photo above, you can see a line of buildings leading to a gap towards the right of the photo where part of the western entrance to the cathedral can be seen.

In the photo below, you can now see the dome, again through ornate ironwork, with more of the row of buildings in front of the cathedral:

There is no glass in the windows of the building on the left, probably from wartime bomb damage. The buildings in the above photo were where the Paternoster Square development is today.

The following photo is very similar to the above photo, but is looking slightly to the right, with part of the western entrance visible:

The Guilds and Livery Companies of the City of London often had their halls set back from the street, with a small courtyard in front, and an alley leading to the street. The alley would have an ornate iron gate to secure access to the courtyard and hall.

One of these halls, Stationers’ Hall is just to the west of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and I checked the OS map published a couple of years after my father took the above photo, and the location of the hall, and view across to the cathedral does seem to correspond to the three photos (Map ‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“):

In the above map, I have underlined Stationers’ Hall with a red line. The square to the lower left of the hall is their garden, and to the lower right is a small courtyard with the double lines, possibly of a gate just to the left of the red arrow, and the lane Stationers Hall Court which could also have been the location of the gates.

The red arrow shows the rough direction of view for the photos.

It is across Ave Maria Lane, and some open space, as the area was bombed badly during the war. To the right of the open space, you can see a a couple of buildings to the right of London House Yard, and leading between the buildings is a small street, also with the name of London House Yard.

Below the red arrow is a line of buildings along Ludgate Hill, and between the two rows of buildings, where the arrow is pointing, there is a gap, and through this gap, the view of the western entrance to St. Paul’s Cathedral is visible, as can be seen in my father’s photos.

So, I am sure that my father was taking photos behind the gates of the entrance to Stationers’ Hall, the short double lines, or in Stationers Hall Lane, to the left of the start of the red arrow in the map. But I cannot be 100% certain.

The reason I cannot be certain is that I cannot find any photos of the gates to the hall to confirm.

The best photo I have been able to find is from the London Picture Archive, and which dates from 1920 and can be seen by clicking here.

In the photo, you can just see the inner gates, and these do not appear to have the ornate ironwork as in my father’s photos.

The outer gates, presumably the ornate iron work in my father’s photos, cannot be seen as they are wide open.

So again, the location looks exactly right, with the view across to the buildings opposite, including the slight offset to where London House Yard runs between the two buildings, and the view of the cathedral through the gap between buildings, all seeming to confirm.

But as I cannot find a photo of the gates, I will leave the word “Probably” in the title of the post.

Time to have a look at Stationers’ Hall, and the hall consists of buildings on two sides of a courtyard, in front, and to the right of the following photo:

The other side of the courtyard:

To learn about the Stationers’, I turned to the book “The Armorial Bearings of the Guilds of London” by John Bromley and published in 1960, which does seem to offer one of the more comprehensive overviews of the City’s guilds and companies.

In this book, the company has the name of “The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers”, which was the full name used from 1937 to recognise the amalgamation of the Stationers’ Company with the Company of Newspaper Makers.

Today, the Newspaper Makers wording has been dropped, and the company describes itself as “The City of London Livery Company for the Communications and Content Industries”, showing how these City institutions have continuously evolved as their trades have changed.

The word “stationer” comes from the Latin word stationarius – a stall holder as opposed to an itinerant seller of goods, and it seems that the important role of these “stationarii” in producing, lending and selling books in mediaeval universities started to limit the name to this specific trade, which also then included bookbinders, illuminators and text writers.

In 1403, Text Writers and Illuminators were united by civic ordinance into a single Guild, which is the direct ancestor of the Company of Stationers’.

On the 4th of May, 1557, the Stationers’ were incorporated by Royal Charter.

The Stationers’ have had a hall on the current site since 1606, following a move from their original, 1554 hall, a short distance away.

The hall has been rebuilt and been through a number of changes and modifications in the past 400 years. It was destroyed in the 1666 Great Fire and more recently suffered serious bomb damage in 1940, during the same raids that resulted in the cleared space seen in front of my father’s photos.

At the rear of the hall is a small garden, and a gate to the side of the hall provides access to Stationers’ Garden:

The following print from 1830 shows the entrance to the garden on the left, and the hall looking much the same as it does today:

Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

On the front of the hall is a memorial to liverymen of the company who lost their lives in the Great War, 1914 – 1918:

And a plaque that records one of the trades associated with the Stationers’, recording that Wynkyn de Worde set up his press in nearby Shoe Lane around the year 1500:

An ornate sign for Stationers’ Hall, with their coat of arms, hangs from the hall:

The arms of the Stationers’ Company include three clasped books, an eagle between two Tudor roses, and above a white bird, a representation of the holy spirit, and a white cloud radiating beams of light.

The arms are also displayed on wooden bollards around the courtyard:

The following view is looking from the courtyard towards St. Paul’s Cathedral. The building surrounding two sides of the courtyard, and blocking the view of the cathedral is the Club Quarters Hotel:

The walk way through the hotel, seen in the above photo, appears to be in the same location as the original exit from the courtyard to Ave Maria Lane. If I am right, it was in this walk way that my father took the photos looking through the old gates.

Walking through, and looking in the direction of the cathedral, the view is still blocked, now by the Paternoster Square development:

Looking back from Ave Maria Lane, with the entrance to the courtyard in front of Stations’ Hall, at ground level, and under the hotel. The gates in my father’s photos would have been somewhere around this entrance:

To get a view of the cathedral, I had to turn right and walk along Ave Maria Lane to Ludgate Hill, where, on the corner of the junction, I had the following view;

Compare the above view with my father’s photos, and imagine then walking to the left, back along Ave Maria Lane to where the entrance to Stationers’ Hall is located, and the alignment of the cathedral, the dome, two towers, is about right in the photos looking through the gate.

I cannot be completely certain, as I cannot find any photos of the gates with the hall behind, but the map, and the views across to the cathedral, including the gap between buildings, and the street layout, all look right.

So whilst I cannot guarantee, I can say that the gates were probably those at the entrance to Stationers’ Hall.

alondoninheritance.com