Shakespeare owned a house in London. We finally know where it was

A chance find in a London archive has allowed a researcher to pinpoint the exact location of William Shakespeare’s London home for the first time.

It had long been known that the playwright owned a house in the Blackfriars, a 13th-century Dominican friary, and it was thought to have been located near the gatehouse.

But the new discovery means we now know its exact location, size and layout, as well as what kind of buildings would have surrounded it, Lucy Munro, Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at King’s College London, England, told CNN on Tuesday.

“It was a really pleasant surprise,” she said, explaining that the information came to light when she found a plan of the district, dating from 1668, during research for a project on local playhouses at the London Archives.

After checking the plan against descriptions of the house featured in the existing scholarship, Munro realized that she had stumbled across definitive proof of its location and layout.