ABSTRACT
The sequence of events by which the conventual buildings on the south side of the church of St. Bartholomew the Great changed hands after the dissolu tion of the monasteries was treated at length by A. E. Webb in 1921 when he published his two-volume Records of St. Bartholomew's, Smithfield. The process was one in which the buildings were first of all adapted as townhouses by members of the nobility, to whom they were granted by the King, gradually undergoing modification as time passed and the quality of the occupiers declined. By the late eighteenth century, when Thomas Hardwick made the plan which is now in the collections of the Society of Antiquaries, some of the mediaeval buildings had vanished completely; and destruction was carried very much further during the nineteenth century, with the building of warehouses and new offices in the area. During the prolonged period of restoration work in the late nineteenth-
early twentieth century the plan of the eastern side of the site was recovered with fair completeness, though not all the remains found could be preserved. Of the western part of the area to the south of the nave very little was known, apart from the east walk of the cloister, which was finally restored in the 1920’s. Here successive alterations had destroyed the monastic buildings unrecorded, apart from the Hardwick drawings already mentioned. This, however, was also the part of the monastic area which had suffered most severely from bombing: the buildings, all apparently of nineteenth-century date, fronting the north side of Bartholomew Close had been destroyed, together with most of those which lay between the north-westward exten sion of the Close and Little Britain; and advantage was therefore taken of the opportunity to explore the area before a new building for St. Bartholomew’s Hospital was erected on the site. Hardwick had shown in his plan the remains of an ‘ancient brick house’
near the site of the south-western corner of the cloister and it was found that some part of this still survived in the ruined shells that were at that time (1 9 5 5) about to be demolished. The features of this building were a doorway with four-centred head opening eastwards and a two-light cellar window, also with four-centred heads, in brick. The date is sixteenth century. In the spandrels of the doorway, below the square moulded frame
