Wellclose Square

The abbey of St Mary Graces stood near Tower Hill until the dissolution of the monasteries.

An old map shows a river running down each side of "Nightingall Lane" (now called Thomas More Street).

In 1954 Kenneth Reid suggested this was one of London's "lost rivers" and that it ran from Well Street into the Thames.

Daniel Defoe mentions the square is his book "A tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain" (1724).

Caius Gabriel Cibber was the architect of the Danish church, built in the centre of the Square in 1696.

Swedenborg arrived in the same year as the Ulrika Eleonora Church was built in Princes Square.

Hayyim Samuel Jacob Falk (1708–1782), a Rabbi and Kabbalist, moved to Wellclose Square in 1742 after narrowly escaping being burnt at the stake by the authorities in Westphalia who charged him with sorcery.

He was known as the "Baal Shem of London" because of his reputation as a practical Kabbalist who worked miracles and appeared to have magical powers.

He was a poet who wrote, with John Bicknell, The Dying Negro about the death of a runaway slave.

Dr Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward (1791 - 1868) invented the terrarium (a dry version of an aquarium).

Starting in 1857, William Smith and Charles Eaton made lead-cast forgeries of antiquities.

Following the destruction of the "Royal Brunswick Theatre" Rev George Smith of the Methodist Mariners church on Dock Street decided to build a sailors' home on the site.

According to Roy Palmer, one version of the sea shanty "Tiger Bay" makes reference to "Well Street", and suggests it was the one by Wellclose Square.