Dark House Lane

Names

  • Dark House Lane
  • Little Somers Key
  • Darkhouse Lane
  • Little Sommers Key

Street/Area/District

  • Dark House Lane

Maps & Views

Descriptions

from A Dictionary of London, by Henry Harben (1918)

Dark House Lane

South out of Lower Thames Street to Somers Quay Stairs, west of Billingsgate (Rocque, 1746–O.S. 1880).

Former name: "Little Somers Key" (Tradesman's token, 1666) (Burn, p. 171).

There seems to have been a house called "The Dark House Billingsgate" in 1671 (L. and P. Chas. II. D.S. xi. 6), from which the lane took its name.

The site is now occupied by Billingsgate Market.

from A Topographical Dictionary of London and Its Environs, by James Elmes (1831)

Darkhouse-Lane, Lower Thames-Street,—at 16, being that number of houses on the R. from London-bridge, on the W. side of Billingsgate-market.

from A Topographical Dictionary of London and Its Environs, by James Elmes (1831)

Darkhouse-Lane, Lower Thames-street, is on the west side of Billingsgate-market, about sixteen houses on the right from London-bridge.

from London Past and Present: Its History, Associations, and Traditions, by Henry Benjamin Wheatley and Peter Cunningham (1891)

Dark House Lane, Billingsgate, on the west side of the market, was so called from a "messuage in Thames Street, next Billingsgate, known by the name of the Dark House."1 Ned Ward has described it in his London Spy, "with the diverting conversation, there, of the fish-women, seamen, and others." At "the Dark House" Hogarth "dropped anchor" on his "Five Days' Perigrination" to the Isle of Grain, and made a sketch of a porter who called himself the Duke of Puddle-dock ... and "was agreeably entertained with the humours of the place."


1Fire of London Papers in British Museum, vol. xii. art. 53.