Locksmith EC2A: Where England's First Theatre Became The Globe

EC2A covers Shoreditch and the streets reaching towards the City's Finsbury Square edge. This ground holds one of English theatre's genuine origin stories. In 1576, actor-manager James Burbage built the Theatre here, on land that had once belonged to the dissolved Holywell Priory. The City of London banned theatrical performances within its own walls. So Burbage built just outside them, in a district already known for brothels and gaming houses rather than respectability. It became England's first successful, purpose-built playhouse, and a young Shakespeare worked here not long after arriving in London, writing several of his earliest plays before the Globe existed at all.

The arrangement didn't last. A dispute with the landlord came to a head in 1598. Rather than lose the building outright, Burbage's sons Richard and Cuthbert had it dismantled, reportedly under cover of winter darkness. The timbers were carried across the Thames to Bankside and used to build the Globe, which opened the following year. The Theatre's own site then disappeared from view entirely. It took until 2008 for Museum of London archaeologists to rediscover its foundations. Further digging in 2018 uncovered a gravel yard where theatregoers once ate and drank, along with a complete Elizabethan goblet and fragments of the money boxes used to collect entry fees.

A Neighbour That Lasted Longer

Barely two hundred yards away, a second playhouse called the Curtain opened in 1577. That made this small stretch of Shoreditch London's first proper entertainment district. When the Theatre's lease trouble forced Shakespeare's company out, they used the Curtain as a temporary home between roughly 1597 and 1599. Tradition holds that Henry V's famous prologue, with its reference to "this wooden O," describes the Curtain itself, since the play is thought to have premiered there before the Globe was built. More recent excavations have complicated that tidy story. They suggest the Curtain may actually have been rectangular rather than round, which has left historians less certain the line was written with this particular building in mind.

Whatever its exact shape, the Curtain outlived its neighbour by decades. It kept going into the 1620s, long after the Theatre's own timbers had gone into the Globe. Both buildings are gone now, found again only through careful digging. We deal with what's actually in front of us rather than old stories. Still, it's no bad thing to work somewhere with this much history underfoot.