Ray Street

Names

  • Ray Street

Street/Area/District

  • Ray Street

Maps & Views

Descriptions

from New remarks of London, by the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks (1732)

In Ray-street is an excellent Spring, formerly called Clerkenwell.

from Lockie's Topography of London, by John Lockie (1810)

Ray-Street, Clerkenwell,—at the N.W. corner of Clerkenwell-green, bearing to the L. extending to Little Warner-st.

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

RAY-ST., Clerkenwell, is at the north-west corner of Clerkenwell-green.

from Old and New London, by Walter Thornbury (1878)

[Ray Street.] In 1774 the notorious and polluted name of Hockley-in-the-Hole was formally changed to that of Ray Street.

On the site of the "Coach and Horses," in Ray Street, once stood the Bear Garden of Hockley-in-the-Hole, which, in Queen Anne's time, rivalled the Southwark Bear Garden of Elizabethan days. Here, in 1700, the masters of the noble science of self-defence held their combats.

 

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

Ray Street, Clerkenwell, formerly Hockley in the Hole. The present name is derived from the proprietor. Here is, or was, the well where the parish clerks before the Reformation performed a miracle-play once a year, and from which the district of Clerkenwell derived its name. The old Ray Street was nearly swept away in the Clerkenwell improvements of 1856 and subsequent years. Some years earlier the clerks' well was discovered to be dangerously polluted by the infiltration of sewage, and closed, and shortly after the pump, which had for many years marked its site, was removed. [See Clerkenwell.]