Who wants to buy our old office?

‘A unique opportunity to purchase the home of a famous weekly magazine.’ Thus might an estate agent market No. 56 Doughty Street, London WC1, now up for sale after more than 30 years as the offices of The Spectator. But an estate agent cannot know how des a res is this early-19th-century house in Bloomsbury. It should be sold not so much for its fabric — handsome as it is, if slightly worn — as for its recent history, for the rich variety of people who have passed through its doors and the voices which may come out of the now possibly rotting woodwork. As someone associated with The Spectator for most of its time in Doughty Street, I offer an insider’s guide for prospective buyers, confident that the building will be bought, whether for a business enterprise or to return it to private use (for which listed-building consent has been given), by a discerning Spectator reader.

As a private house — on four floors, plus basement and garden — in this wide, quiet Georgian street, No. 56 was only a few doors down from Charles Dickens (whose biographer, Peter Ackroyd, also historian of London, worked at The Spectator for several years). When Laurence Turner, sculptor and carver, lived here in the first part of the 20th century, he modelled the decorative plaster ceilings and cornices on the ground and first floors. The publishing firm of Blond Briggs was here in 1975 when The Spectator, having just been bought by Henry Keswick, had to move from its home in Gower Street and find new premises at very short notice. Anthony Blond obliged and moved out.

For the first ten years the basement remained uninhabitable, used as a storeroom and dump. From 1985 it housed the advertising department, and is now, in estate agents’ jargon, suitable for further modernisation and refurbishment.