Dr Johnson's House

You are approaching seventeen Gough Square, a quiet, narrow townhouse that stands as the sole survivor among the eighteen different London residences where the writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson lived. Built around seventeen hundred by a wool merchant named Richard Gough, this structure served as Johnson’s home and workplace from seventeen forty-eight to seventeen fifty-nine. While the surrounding area has been radically reshaped by centuries of urban development and the destruction of the Second World War, this house remains largely intact as a rare example of a Queen Anne townhouse. The building is famous for the attic garret where Johnson painstakingly compiled his monumental A Dictionary of the English Language, a project that redefined the structure of the English language itself.