Hatton Garden

St Etheldreda's Church in Ely Place, all that survives of the old Bishop's Palace, is one of only two remaining buildings in London dating from the reign of Edward I.

Surrounding streets including Hatton Place and Saffron Hill (the insalubrious setting for Fagin's den in Oliver Twist) were improved during the 20th century and in modern times have been developed with blocks of 'luxury' apartments, including Da Vinci House (occupying the former Punch magazine printworks) and the architecturally distinctive Ziggurat Building.

To raise money Lord Hatton granted a long lease of the site in 1654, which became effectively permanent in 1658, though he retained the freehold.

In this way a varied but harmonious townscape, with attractive detail of porches and interior panelling,[7] grew up on a rectangular grid of new streets.

[12] Great Kirby Street, parallel to Hatton Street on the east side, enclosed a central block with rear gardens backing, but in the northern sectors, Hatt and Tunn Yard on the east (on the site of Hatton Place) and other small yards on the west provided access to smaller dwellings and coach houses.

[14] Arlidge's survey of 1694 shows the completed estate in detail:[15] he succeeded Sir John Cass as Master of the Worshipful Company of Carpenters in 1712.

[16] Among early residents were Christopher Merret, Robert Ferguson, John Flamsteed, William Whiston and Captain Thomas Coram.

After letting them in the owner asked to see the search warrant, whereupon he was forced at gunpoint into an inner room and locked in while the intruders rifled the house of its valuables.

In 1685, the notorious informer and confidence trickster Thomas Dangerfield, who was being returned to prison after a public whipping, was killed in Hatton Garden in an altercation with a barrister called Robert Francis, who struck him in the eye with his cane.

Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, humorists in the 1960s and 1970s, celebrated Hatton Garden's connection with the jewellery trade in their song of a sewage worker, "Down Below": In Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited, Rex Mottram takes Julia Marchmain to a dealer in Hatton Garden to buy her engagement ring: He bought her a ring, not, as she expected, from a tray in Cartier's, but in a back room in Hatton Garden from a man who brought stones out of a bag in a little safe...then another man in another back room made designs for the setting with a stub of a pencil on a sheet of notepaper, and the result excited the admiration of all her friends.

[62]Hatton Garden features in the children's novel Smith by Leon Garfield, where the main character tries to elude two pursuers through the crumbling streets of 18th-century Holborn.

The 1924 mystery novel Inspector French's Greatest Case by Freeman Wills Crofts takes place in and around Hatton Garden.