The extension is below the arrow on the left – and Wren’s design for the final stage on the right

The interior of Westminster Abbey is huge and sublime. But we only see part of it as the very spacious Upper Gallery or Triforium  – some seven storeys high – has been closed off. But not for much longer. The Abbey is about to apply to Westminster Council to build new stairs and lifts between Poets’ Corner and the Chapter House to enable public access which is only possible at present by way of a small spiral staircase.
The model for the new access, which members of the Thorney Island Society had a preview of yesterday  (see arrow, above left) shows how the Ptolemy Dean – an architect with a name even more historic than the Abbey – has tried to overcome the difficult task of harmonising the style with the rest of the Abbey. In common with many other medieval buildings it will be clad in lead rather than stone which is too bulky for the constrained space.
The Triforium, which boasts spectacular views of the inside of the Abbey, will be used as exhibition space for the numerous treasures that the Abbey is custodian of. If planning permission is granted it could be open to the public by 2017. But this doesn’t mean that building work on the present church, (technically it is not an abbey) completed by Edward the Confessor in 1160 on the site of an earlier church, will be finished. The first stage was an education centre and delightful cellarium, where I often have an afternoon coffee, while the third stage will be construction of a spire (above, right) as conceived by Sir Christopher Wren over three hundred years old. Since the original foundations were planned conservatively to support a spire there is apparently no need for further re-inforcement. All that is now needed is someone with pockets as deep as the spire is high.

It is not often that we London bloggers stumble across something that stops us in our tracks – but it happened yesterday. Twice. The first time was during a delightful tour of the venerable Apothecaries Hall in Blackfriars whose alumni include John Keats, Agatha Christie and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman to blast her way – and it needed some blasting – into qualifying as a doctor. The tour itself, organised by London Historians, was memorable. Apothecaries are the largest City livery society (indeed, the only one as the others which dirty their fingers in trade are mere companies) and has a dizzy array of panelled halls and rooms replete with portraits of its illustrious leaders (see, below). Well worth a visit on the few days it is open to the public.

But the Hall is also of interest because it sits on the site of the medieval Blackfriars Monastery where Parliament once sat and where Catherine of Aragon defended herself when Henry VIII divorced her for Anne Boleyn.  William Langland in the ancient poem, Piers Plowman, railed against the loucheness of the monks, but that’s another story. After the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s Blackfriars became a posh residential area and the site of two theatres, the first of which used some of the space now occupied by the Apothecaries Hall and the second was Shakespeare’s indoor theatre which was immediately south of what is now the hall.

Hardly anything of the monastery now remains apart from a tiny section of wall  and part of another wall lost inside a nearby office block  which very few people have seen. So, imagine our surprise when we asked our admirable guide, the Beagle, Gary Howe, whether there were any traces of the old monastery  left. At first he seemed to say No but then added that comparatively recently they had found a crypt-like arched room 20 metres long after lifting some carpet tiles and descending down a narrow opening. They didn’t take any photographs so this hidden gem – for once the term is correctly used – still remains hidden. He was kind enough to lift the carpet tiles, tantalisingly,  for us (above, left) which are immediately in front as you walk in the main door and the remains of the monastery would run roughly beneath the front of the building (above, right), where some London Historians are standing).

If that wasn’t enough for one day we took a visitor from New York around the corner through Playhouse Yard and along Ireland Lane to show her the Cockpit Pub on the site of the only property Shakespeare is know for certain to have purchased . But when we got there we bumped into the Chambers director of the building opposite who not only claims that it is the  true site of the gatehouse but points to a new plaque on the wall, approved by the Corporation of London, which has endorsed it. I will need more evidence before I take sides in this Shakespearean turf war – and in any case there is a limit to the number of surprises you can take in a single day.

Medieval stained glass, (above) and dining hall, below)

Left, remains of monastery wall. Right – Cockpit pub, site of Shakespeare’s house

LONDON is often accused of hiding its history but seldom has anything been as well buried as the history of Blackfriars. I walked to work for many years up the deeply uninspiring Farringdon Road without any idea that on the (eastern) side of the street once stood the monastery of the Dominicans or Black Friars from 1276 until the Dissolution in the 1530s when it was divvied up among Henry V111’s cronies. In Henry’s time the former refectory was often used for meetings of Parliament and in  May 1529, the Parliament Chamber – later to become Shakespeare’s indoor theatre – was where the annulment of Henry V111’s first marriage to Catherine of Aragon was debated.

Blackfriars played a seminal role in Shakespeare’s life because when his troupe was forced to leave The Theatre in Shoreditch in 1598, it tried to set up in The Blackfriars precinct only to be thwarted by a group of aristocratic Puritans led by the uber-connected Lady Elizabeth Russell whose single-mindedness makes Mrs Thatcher look like a girl guide. As a fascinating book just published (Chris Laoutaris, Shakespeare and the Countess) argues, it was only because Shakespeare’s troupe – led By Richard Burbage – was thwarted in Blackfriars by Lady Russell and her neighbours that it had to resort to Plan B – to build the Globe over the Thames on Bankside out of timbers recycled from The Theatre. Without Lady Elizabeth’s nimbyism, there may have been no Globe. Anazing thought.

Old wall (left). Playhouse Yard (right). The theatre was near the pillared building at the back

Later on in 1608, after Lady Elizabeth’s death, Shakespeare and his King’s Men were able to occupy, or re-occupy the (much more profitable) Blackfriars site in the Parliament/Refectory hall where they staged Henry V111 (originally called All is True) in the very hall where Henry’s divorce petition against Anne Boleyn had been debated years earlier and using some of the actual words mouthed by Catherine.