The Giltspur Street Compter

Extract

It is tempting to speculate as to what architectural wonders the younger George Dance might have achieved had he not been tied for the greater part of his working life to demanding routine duties as Clerk of the Works — a title later raised to the more dignified form of Architect — to the Corporation of London. Certainly the handful of important commissions which materialized during those years proved him to be a designer of outstanding distinction whom C. R. Cockerell was later to acclaim as 'the complete Poet architect of his day'. Many of his notable conceptions, however, such as the Port of London warehouses, the double bridge over the Thames, and the grand southern approach to St Paul's Cathedral, were frustrated, while much of his time was spent in dealing with the daily quota of petty tasks and endless complaints. Of his major works there are now only two survivors, the façade to Guildhall, and the little church of All Hallows, London Wall. His development of the Finsbury Estate remains in outline only, and the finest of his buildings, Newgate Gaol, was demolished in 1902 although it was reasonably well recorded in photographs. The later and smaller prison which Dance built a few yards to the north of Newgate Street was doomed to an even shorter life and no photographs of it are known to exist. This was the Giltspur Street Compter, and its story deserves to be told since Dance was clearly anxious that its main façade should accord with his larger gaol, and that the two should complement each other in providing a visually imposing approach to the heart of the City from Holborn.