Cool Finds

Shakespeare’s House in London Was Lost to History. A Scholar Discovered a Map in the Archives That Revealed Its Exact Location

The Bard purchased the property three years before his death in 1616. Had he hoped to spend more time in the city where he wrote his best-known plays?

Ellen Wexler | Writer and Special Projects Editor

April 17, 2026

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Across from a pub in central London, pedestrians may notice a small plaque: On March 10, 1613, it states, “William Shakespeare purchased lodgings in the Blackfriars gatehouse located near this site.”

The marker is affixed to an office building constructed centuries after the Bard’s lifetime. Scholars have long known that Shakespeare purchased a house somewhere in London’s Blackfriars district in 1613, three years before his death, but it was razed long ago. Its precise location had always been a mystery.

Now, Lucy Munro, a literary scholar at King’s College London, says she’s stumbled upon a map at the London Archives showing exactly where the house once stood.

“I was doing research as part of a wider project and couldn’t believe it when I realized what I was looking at—the floorplan of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars house,” Munro says in a statement. “It had been assumed that there wasn’t much more evidence to gather about it, so research on it has laid dormant for a while.”

Munro had been studying the Blackfriars theater, the playhouse where Shakespeare’s acting company, the King’s Men, once performed, when she found the map in a box of centuries-old property deeds. Scholars have long puzzled over the playwright’s motivation for purchasing the house, but they’d never linked it to this particular document.

For most of his life, Shakespeare’s home was Stratford-upon-Avon, a town roughly 100 miles northwest of London. He was born there in 1564, and he died there in 1616. Today, tourists can visit his grave at Holy Trinity Church, the same church where he was baptized as a baby.

Despite Shakespeare’s near-mythological status, scholars have many unanswered questions about his adult life. Generally speaking, they know that he traveled back and forth between Stratford, where he lived with his family, and London, where he made a name for himself in the city’s thriving theater scene.

“It’s good, I think, to think of Shakespeare as a literary commuter traveling to and from London,” Paul Edmondson, head of research and knowledge at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, told the “Let’s Talk Shakespeare” podcast in 2015. “Shakespeare’s colleagues were in London. His working life—his professional life for the theater, of course—centered around London.”

Scholars think Shakespeare started traveling to London by the 1580s, around the time that he got married and fathered three children. His family remained behind when he went to the city, where he wrote and performed his plays. For most of that time, he chose to rent rather than buy—until 1613.

That same year, London’s Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare’s company famously performed, burned down in a fire. Soon after, the Bard is thought to have withdrawn from his career and returned to his family.

“This discovery throws into question the narrative that Shakespeare simply retired to Stratford,” Munro tells the New York Times’ Stephen Castle. “It makes us think again about his relationship with London.”

Had the Bard planned to spend more time in London before his death at age 52? Had he hoped to continue working in the city where he’d completed his best-known plays? The newly discovered map, which dates to the mid-17th century, shows that Shakespeare’s property was a “substantial” L-shaped building, per the statement. The ground floor measured 45 feet from east to west.

Around the time that Shakespeare bought the house, he was working with the playwright John Fletcher on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, which would be his final creations. Munro wonders whether Shakespeare wrote parts of either play at the newly discovered house.

“He’s not the isolated genius sitting in an attic. He’s somebody who’s collaborating with other playwrights,” she tells CNN’s Jack Guy, adding that the purchase may suggest “a level of engagement with his professional life in London still in 1613.”

In addition to the map, Munro unearthed two other revealing documents, both related to the sale of the property. Shakespeare’s granddaughter, who inherited the house, sold it in 1665, and it burned down during the Great Fire of London the following year.

“It’s fabulous that we’ve got more detail about the property,” Chris Laoutaris, a literary scholar at the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, tells the Times. Perhaps, he adds, Shakespeare saw the house as both a financial investment and “lodgings for himself or a base where he might have continued to work.”

Munro argues that this particular purchase wasn’t motivated by profit, as Shakespeare could have bought property anywhere in London. Instead, he chose a house near the Blackfriars theater—and a short walk from the Globe.

The Blackfriars district had once been a medieval Dominican friary. But after England’s Henry VIII dissolved the hundreds of monasteries, nunneries and friaries in the 16th century, the buildings were used for other purposes. When Shakespeare moved in, his neighbors were mostly elites who spurned London’s theater scene.

“After the dissolution of the monasteries, a lot of the nobility, quite high-ranking courtiers, court officials are living in the Blackfriars,” Munro tells the Associated Press’ Jill Lawless. When Shakespeare purchased the house, “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.”

The Blackfriars theater was demolished in the 17th century. Today, the only hint of its presence is a narrow street known as Playhouse Yard, just down the block from the plaque noting that Shakespeare’s house once stood nearby. “Shakespeare may or may not have ‘lodged’ in his Blackfriars house,” Munro writes in the Times Literary Supplement, “but we can now say with confidence that the blue plaque is not merely ‘near’ its site, but on the very spot.”

Ellen Wexler | | Read More

Ellen Wexler is a staff writer and special projects editor, digital, for Smithsonian magazine.