Estates in Bloomsbury

1 Duke of Bedford
2 City of London Corporation
3 Capper Mortimer
4 Fitzroy (Duke of Grafton)
5 Somers
6 Skinners' (Tonbridge)
7 Battle Bridge
8 Lucas
9 Harrison
10 Foundling Hospital
11 Rugby
12 Bedford Charity (Harpur)
13 Doughty
14 Gray's Inn
15 Bainbridge–Dyott (Rookeries)

Area between the Foundling and Harrison estates: Church land

Grey areas: fragmented ownership and haphazard development; already built up by 1800

About the Gray’s Inn Estate

Gray’s Inn is one of the four Inns of Court in London, which control admission to the Bar for lawyers in England and Wales

Its estate in the south-east corner of Bloomsbury is on the edge of the legal district of London and has its origins in the manor house of Purpoole (www.graysinn.info)

The Inn developed and prospered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not only as a place of training for lawyers, but also as a place of entertainment and celebration (www.graysinn.info)

It was a residential place of training akin to the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, with a Hall, Chapel, Library, accommodation, and extensive gardens, all arranged around Squares

As an Inn of Court it was also extra-parochial, or outside the boundaries of local parishes, and exempt from their taxes

It continues to operate as a place of legal training and a base for barristers’ chambers

Verulam Buildings

It is in the south-east of Bloomsbury, being a short terrace in the north-east corner of Gray's Inn

It was built in 1803–1811, on the site of Francis Bacon’s flower garden, and named after his title, Lord Verulam

It was designed to attract lawyers and other professional occupants

It held a mixture of residential dwellings and professional chambers in the early nineteenth century

The actor Edward William Elton originally trained for the law at the offices of the solicitor Springhall here in the early nineteenth century (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

No. 2 was the first home of the Medical and Chirurgical Society, later the Royal Society of Medicine; it met here from 1805 until it moved to Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1810

The street continues to house lawyers’ chambers