The Drapers' Hall, Throgmorton Street,
near the junction with Broad Street

This stands on a spot where once stood a palace built by Thomas Cromwell, earl of Essex, in the reign of Henry VIII. Attainted and executed for high treason (Cromwell was an unpopular neighbour, on one instance putting his neighbours' houses on rollers and shifting them more than twenty feet that he might have more garden), the Drapers purchased the hall. Drapers' Hall burned down in the Great Fire of London in 1666, being rebuilt in a spacious manner on the same site in 1667. Further damaged by fire in the late eighteenth century, the Adams Brothers re-designed and rebuilt the frontage in the 1770s. The Hall was re-modelled once more in the late eighteenth century. A large garden adjoins the Hall (once stretching almost to London Wall) which, in the Georgian period, was opened to the public on weekdays between morning and sunset and was a place of pleasant gravelled walks, fountains, lime trees and pavillions.