Earl Street (inc. Palace Yard)

This is a great photo and clearly shows the narrowness of the roads all the way up to LPS(?). Helen - Was Court 2 demolished in 1808 or 1908?

I think it's a typo from Helen William - it's 1908. You can see the Court here on this 1887 CD map -

Thanks William, I did mean 1908. I've corrected the original. I'm too submerged in yesteryear at the moment. Normally I get the mistake the other way round and say 19xy when I mean 18xy or even 17xy. The roads seemed impossibly narrow to modern standards but they concertinaed in and out over the centuries. Owners were often sneaking a bit of pavement into their control with temporary structures and if nobody objected over the decades they then built permanently. Proper raised pavements probably made the width of the road more of an issue because the earlier arrangement allowed carts to use pedestrian spaces as and when they needed to. Give or take cellar stairways and shutter/display tables. The worst pinch points were the junctions of the roads and they were mostly the first areas to be widened. Road widening was under way in the 1700s and 1800s but sped up in the 1900s.

Taken from an old directory - No.39 - though I thought this was the Dragoon Cycle Shop?