Gateway to the City

Otherwise 68 King William Street, some part of the ground floor of which is presently home to the Wolseley City restaurant. At or around gmaps 51.5107525,-0.0867223.

The building, once notable for the golden owl sitting on the clock out front, is described at reference 3. Reference 3 points to the picture above, to be found at reference 2, which Historic England have gone to some trouble to stop you copying. Why they make such a fuss about their images - much more than say, the National Gallery or the Tate Gallery - I cannot imagine. A picture from the interior of the building in the early 1920s, in its glory days as offices of the Guardian Assurance Company.

It seems that, despite appearances, the building was never intended for single occupation and was, inside at least, two buildings, with two entrances. Presumably the entrances that can be seen left and right in the snap above, which I was allowed to copy. 

Not quite as grand as the Debenham & Freebody building opposite the Wigmore Hall, noticed here from time to time and snapped below, but of roughly the same generation and from the same family.

While maybe fifty years later, maybe more, this City building was the home to the House of Fraser.

And some time after that, the Wolseley took on a good chunk of the ground floor. Maybe some of the space above for its advertised private rooms?

PS 1: I declined the invitation to include the Historic England code snapped above in my website. Who knows what it might get up to - with its specialised services from the people at reference 4. Ask Gemini?

In the event, Gemini was able to give a very good summary of what this code snippet was up to, closing with: '... In short, this code is a way to display someone else's copyrighted picture on your website legally and securely, while giving the original owner control over their content'. I was impressed.

And in a response to a supplementary, he went on to explain that I would be putting a good deal of trust in Smartframe. Trust that they were not doing anything bad themselves and trust that they ran a tight ship, that no-one was going to hack into them and through them, into their customers, that is to say me. There were mitigations - but to put them in place you needed careful, quality geeks. It all sounded to me like more risk than an SME should be taking on.

PS 2: this building is quite near Richard Church's Custom House, which turned up in these pages just about a year ago, for example at reference 5. The snap above is the view from the river: it is even grimmer from the Thames Street side. A building dating from the days when customs was a much bigger chunk of the revenue of the government than it s now.

Bing also turns up the snap above, wrongly labelled as the Custom House, but I am having some trouble finding our what building it really is. With the AI assistant to Google Images offering various wrong answers depending on exactly what clues I give it. A bit like its efforts yesterday on the curious grass by the side of our house.

A snap mixed up with people called Vecteezy, but not much like the offerings at reference 6. Is it a fake? Is it fair to expect Google Images to identify a good fake?

Unfortunately, the inscription on the pediment is not legible, although, despite appearances, he is firm that it is not Russian...

References

Reference 1: https://thewolseleycity.com/.

Reference 2: https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/photos/item/BL26443.

Reference 3: https://london1psychotherapist.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/68-king-william-street-london-ec4/.

Reference 4: https://smartframe.io/.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/09/church-two.html.

Reference 6: https://www.vecteezy.com/search?qterm=custom-house-london&content_type=vector.