Doctors Commons, where the ecclesiastical lawyers practised and dined from
Elizabeth's reign to mid-Victorian times, is immortal in the pages of David Copperfield though its site is now partly covered by Queen Victoria Street. An authoritative history and description of it, with plans and illustrations, are to be found in the new volume of the London Topographical Record produced by the London Topographical
Society (at 40 Baker Street, W. 1, 21s.). Mr. P. W. Chandler. 'Miss Jeffries Davis and Miss Edith Pickard are much to be commended on the care and skill with which they have elucidated this complex question. Doctors Commons had
delightfully collegiate air, to judge from the drawings reproduced. The last surviving advocates disguised the _library and records in 1861 and sold the buildings in 1862, and the Court of Probate, which had rendered their vocation 'obsolete, was soon removed elsewhere. In the same volume Mr. Walter Bell has an attractive little paper on Nevill's _Court, off Fetter Lane. But when he wrote in September, 1980, that this queer little foot-passage was " undergoing transition," he was premature. Nevill's Court with its seventeenth-century houses and their front gardens is still unchanged.
Previous page
