I was winding my way up through the smaller streets from Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the British Museum when I spotted this entrance to Pied Bull Yard from Bury Place. I’d never noticed it before so thought I would have a poke around.
The building surrounding this entrance is Georgian, with its classic 3×4 windows a giveaway, but if you walk through into the Yard, you find that the buildings that make up the far and right hand side of the open space are much more modern, dating from after World War Two. The Yard is tiled with 1980’s style bricks and a tree sits at its centre. The mixture of architecture gives it an unfortunate air, neither one thing nor another. But despite that it is noticeably quieter than the surrounding streets and its not an unpleasant place.
I think a pied bull is one having skin that has two or more different colours to it. The pied bull after which the yard is named was actually a local inn and this space was likely to have been more familiar with horses than cows as it was set up as stables that the customers of the inn would have used to rest their horses while they stayed at the inn. It appeared as “Stable Yard” in eighteenth century maps before being identified under its current name on maps published at the beginning of the nineteenth century around the time of the Battle of Trafalgar.
The Yard was likely to have been more like a contemporary Mews in the nineteenth century with the former stables being converted for and used by a variety of trades and craftsmen such as a coach-maker, an iron-monger, a grocer, a solicitor and a pair of printers. Nowadays the Yard is home to an expensive camera shop specialising in Leicas, a posh looking wine bar, the London Review Bookshop and the Cafe Le Cordon Bleu. The Yard is full of tables and chairs belonging to the wine bar and the cafe. It has certainly come up in the world.
On the right hand side of the Yard there is a passageway through one of the modern buildings to another open space but on closer inspection this second space is actually Galen Place. It used to be part of Pied Bull Yard but was turned into Galen Place as part of a development of the Pharmaceutical Society buildings at the end of the nineteenth century.
After having been torn asunder by the Victorian developers, the Yard then copped a delivery from the Luftwaffe in the Second World War, the consequences of which must have cleared a space that led to the development of the modern buildings on this site.
Its not the prettiest part of London, but like other Courts and Mews, Pied Bull Yard is a pleasant, quiet place to step off London’s busy streets and spend a few peaceful moments sitting down with a glass of something cold to pass the time with.
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