Wych Street derived its name from the Via de Aldwych, of which it originally formed a part - a lane leading from the north side of the Strand to Broad Street, St Giles’s.

The area around Drury Lane was not affected by the Great Fire of London. It contained decrepit Elizabethan houses with projecting wooden jetties.

At the western end was Drury House, the house of Sir Robert Drury, from which Drury Lane took its name, later rebuilt as Craven House by Lord Craven, and finally turned into a public house, the Queen of Bohemia, named after Lord Craven’s mistress, Elizabeth of Bohemia, the daughter of James I. This building was later demolished, and replaced by the first Olympic Theatre.

The Angel Inn public house was at the bottom of Wych Street, by the Strand. From the Angel Inn, Bishop Hooper was taken in 1554 to Gloucester to be burnt at the stake.

In 1734, a certain Mr Diprose wrote that the street was "much taken up by upholsterers for the sale of bedding and second-hand household goods."

Around 1780, the brothers George and John Jacob Astor, who later became America’s first multimillionaire, ran an instrument store at 26 Wych Street.

To the west, about halfway along on the north side, was the New Inn, an Inn of Chancery where Sir Thomas More received his early legal education.

To the south, Lyon’s Inn, another Inn of Chancery was where Sir Edward Coke was a reader in 1578. It faced Newcastle Street, on its eastern side, between Wych Street and Holywell Street - one entrance led to it from the latter, and also another through Horne Court, next door to an inn known as the Spotted Dog. It was replaced by the Globe Theatre and the Opera Comique around 1863.




Shopping in Wych Street – note the sign of the crescent moon
(Bishopsgate Institute) (click image to enlarge)


In ’Old and New London’ (1878), it was noted that "this thoroughfare has gained a notoriety for the sale of books and prints of an immoral class, and at present the sale of them is only partially suppressed."

On the north side of Wych Street, nearly about the centre, is the entrance to New Inn, through which in the day-time there is a thoroughfare into the dismal region of Clare Market. In a narrow court of this street the notorious Jack Sheppard served his apprenticeship to Mr. Wood, the carpenter; and in White Lion Passage stood the "hostelrie" of the "White Lion," the scene of many of the events in the career of that prince of "cracksmen," who used nightly to meet in the taproom his professional friends and acquaintances, and with whose feats and various adventures the pen of Mr. Harrison Ainsworth has made us so familiar.

Jack Sheppard, an infamous thief, was apprenticed to a carpenter, Mr Wood, on Wych Street. One of Sheppard’s haunts, the White Lion tavern, was also on Wych Street. The music hall performer Arthur Lloyd lived at 39 Wych Street in 1892.

The street was demolished by the London County Council around 1901, as part of the redevelopment that created the Kingsway and Aldwych.