Location

Getting to Abchurch Lane
 
Public transport, always good in London, is excellent. The nearest underground station is Bank, with a new entrance with step-free access to the Northern Line scheduled to open on the corner of Nicholas Lane and Cannon Street in 2022. There will be building work and some disruption until then. Bank Station is four stops from Kings Cross St Pancras and the Eurostar, five from Euston, and both taking less than fifteen minutes. The Central Line, London’s longest, extends from beyond Northolt in the west to Epping Forest in the east. The Waterloo & City Line serves Waterloo Station. Monument station is also very near.

Cannon Street railway station is a short walk away, within five minutes of Abchurch Lane.

From Bank via the Docklands Light Railway takes just over 20 minutes to City Airport. Heathrow, Gatwick and Luton will need about 75 minutes in transit time, plus walking at the terminals. Liverpool Street, serving Stansted Airport, is one stop on the underground.

Premises

An Historic Location

The Society has moved to the heart of the old City of London. Abchurch Lane, first recorded as Abbechurche Lane in 1291, is a narrow street linking Cannon Street and King William Street which bisects it. The site was part of the old Roman city, and a Roman wall was excavated nearby in 1855.

Remarkably, it has a number of philatelic connections. The printing firm of Blades & East, later Blades, East & Blades, responsible for the first stamp issues of North Borneo, was at 11, and later 23, Abchurch Lane. As is widely known, Perkins, Bacon & Petch were the printers of the Penny Black. With its demise in 1935, a new company was formed called Perkins Bacon Ltd. It was owned by John Hubbard (1902-1976), past president of the Royal and its address was 22 Abchurch Lane, London EC4. Change Alley and Birkin Lane, where office boys bought, sold and exchanged stamps from the City trading houses as early as the 1860s, are close by.

The Corsini Correspondence is familiar to postal historians. The Florentine merchants, brothers Filippo and Bartholomew Corsini, lived in Gratious Street, now known as Gracechurch Street. Their archive was the only commercial correspondence addressed to the City of London known to have survived the Great Fire of 1666. Their home was a few minutes from our new home in Abchurch Lane, in the same ancient ward of Candlewick, one of the 25 electoral districts in the City of London.

Inside the Building

Rather than try to describe the inside of the building, we have compiled a pack of pictures that show each of the rooms, floor by floor. You can view this by clicking here. Note that currently, this shows the building as it has been, in use by the London Capital Club. In due course, the pack will be updated to show how it looks now it is our new premises.