3-095-492 - "Royal Academy of Arts, London"/Heritage Images

Shaftesbury House, Aldersgate Street, c1879. Shops in the City of London: Phillips & Co. Tea Establishment. "Thanet House...is now known as Shaftesbury House. It was built about 1644 by Inigo Jones. This house has had varied fortunes. From the Earls of Thanet it passed to Anthony Ashley Cooper, afterwards first Earl of Shaftesbury, Dryden's "Achitophel" and one of the Cabal Ministry, whence its present name. At the beginning of the eighteenth century it came again into the possession of the Thanet family, was afterwards an inn and a tavern, and in 1750 became a Lying-in-Hospital, and subsequently a Dispensary." Description by Alfred Marks. Shaftesbury House, (numbers 35 to 38 Aldersgate), was described by Walter Thornbury in 1878 as a fine old house, distinguished by a series of eight pilasters. It seems, that at the time of Dixon's photograph, the general dispensary, which Marks mentions, had gone and the building had been divided into shops. In this capacity, it survived a little longer but as Marks reports in the 1882 letterpress, Shaftesbury House, long threatened, had at last fallen.