This royal residence started life as Thomas Wolsey’s first major building project, before hosting Henry VIII’s parliament twice in the 1520s.
The royal house that was to become known as Bridewell was granted to Thomas Wolsey in 1510 in the form of a lease on the Rectory House of St. Bride’s Fleet Street near the north end of modern Blackfriars Bridge. It was in a useful location just outside the walls of the City of London and not far from the Great Wardrobe and Baynard’s Castle and just over the river Fleet from Blackfriars. As far as we can tell Wolsey’s house was a single courtyard with a long gallery jutting out from the main buildings and, in this case, running down to the river. Wolsey put Thomas Larke, his confessor and brother of his mistress in charge of the work but, before the house got very far, Wolsey became archbishop of York and acquired York Place and Hampton Court. His new house was now surplus to requirements and he suggested to Henry that it might suit his. Bridewell thus became Henry VIII’s first domestic building project.
In 1978, in advance of a big office redevelopment, part of the site of Bridewell was excavated and, ten years later, using an amazing eighteenth century survey in the Museum of London, I was able to reconstruct the sequence in which the house was built and some of its internal arrangements. What became clear is that Henry VIII revised Wolsey’s original plans and embarked on a larger house with a second courtyard and more extensive kitchens. Worked cracked on and, in the end, the king spent £20,000 on this new residence.
Bridewell was the perfect replacement for Westminster: it was situated on the river so the king could easily reach it by barge, it was quite large and much more modern than Westminster and like Richmond and Greenwich, it was connected directly to a friary – The London Blackfriars. Moreover this was the largest and most important friary in England with more than a century of close associations with the court. The friary may have been useful to the king for his personal devotions, but it was much more important as a substitute for Westminster Abbey for state ceremonial. So it was to Bridewell that the king summoned parliament in 1523 and 1529.
So genuinely in the 1520s there was a new official royal seat at Bridewell, a place at which the principal ceremonial of the kingdom was staged. But Bridewell, no more than Westminster, was a favoured residence the King much preferred Greenwich and after he acquired York Place Bridewell fell out of royal use and was lent to visiting ambassadors.
In February 1552 Edward VI, listening to a lent sermon in the preaching place at Whitehall, was struck by Bishop Ridley’s plea to do something about the destitute, the disabled and the lepers who disfigured the streets of London. Two months later Ridley and the Mayor asked the king, on bended knee, ‘for one of your grace’s houses, called Bridewell, a thing no doubt unmeet to ask for’ and at an audience at Whitehall in April 1553 Edward, now weak and ill, granted Bridewell ‘to be a workhouse for the poor and idle persons of the city of London’.
In this way Henry VIII’s first new house, scene of the dramas of his divorce passed out of royal hands and gave its name colloquially prisons, police stations and even to Chicago City’s main Jail. The building was eventually demolished in the 1860s to make way for a hotel. A rebuilt gatehouse in the style of the original is incorporated as the front of the office block at 14 New Bridge Street.