I think this is the site of Fisher's Folly. In Chasing Shakespeares, I added scaffolding because there's a running joke in the book that everything is being renovated for the millennium.

The joke I really wanted was the escalators--for some reason, almost every escalator in London was down, and at one point in the book, everyone was traipsing up the enormous Tube escalators, passing posters extolling the millennium. But the escalators ended up on the cutting-room floor. Sigh.

(Added 8/4/03) Jenny Lee of the Rare Books Library at Columbia discovered that one wall of Fisher's Folly is still standing, and took a picture of it, which she's kindly allowed me to use here. Is the building behind the wall in the lower photo the back of the building on the left in the top photo? In any case, look and be thrilled; this is a building Shakespeare may have visited, perhaps may have lived in.

The house took up all of a modern city block.

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