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Shakespeare’s Lost London Home Discovered After 400 Years

“I was doing research as part of a wider project and couldn’t believe it when I realized what I was looking at,” the English professor said.

William Shakespeare’s long-lost London house has been located in Blackfriars, thanks to English professor Lucy Munro, who discovered its floor plan among documents from the London Archives and the National Archives. “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,” the Shakespeare expert told the BBC. Historians suspected Shakespeare owned a home in London, but Munro’s find revealed its exact location. “It would have been sort of L-shaped, with part of it going over the gatehouse. It’s not huge, but it’s relatively substantial. It was large enough to be subdivided into two houses at some point,” Munro described the property to CNN, which she says is near where Shakespeare worked at Blackfriars Theater. According to documents unearthed by the academic, Shakespeare’s granddaughter sold the house in 1665, decades after his death, and a year before the Great Fire of London.