London’s tallest door – at the Elms Lester Painting Rooms, Flitcroft Street

KNOCK knock. Who’s there? Doors. They range from a grand Egyptian-themed entrance in Mornington Crescent to London’s tallest door, in the West End. Portals magnificent and modest, including street art-emblazoned examples in Camden Town, an ancient gate in Clerkenwell and entrances used by the literati and glitterati, stand proud in a lavishly illustrated book.

Doors of London: Styles, Stories, Art and Architecture teams a vivid bevy of photographs by Cath Harries with intriguing text by house historian Melanie Backe-Hansen, who was research consultant for TV series A House Through Time.

Photographer Cath says her “obsession” with taking pictures of doors – she has snapped more than 3,000 – began in 2010. She was taking photographs for a London pub guide and began looking out for doors to snap while walking between pubs.

Former King’s Cross resident Cath told Review: “I thought it’d make for an interesting project to capture the diversity of doors in London – quirky, grand, old, modern, Art Deco, ones covered in street art, stage doors, doors in film and TV and famous authors’ doors, just to name a few.”

Each chapter focuses on a different part of the capital. Melanie said short histories of each area provide context to how it developed over time, which impacted the types of door found there.

People who passed through the doorways bring them to life. Picture the late artist and writer Sebastian Horsley, a flamboyant dandy who wore a trademark stovepipe hat, emerging from his home in Meard Street, Soho. Until recently the front door had a sign reading: “This is not a brothel. There are no prostitutes at this address.”

Cath Harries

Horsley, whose flat housed a collection of human skulls, underwent a “crucifixion” in the Philippines to prepare for a series of paintings on the topic.

A Georgian door topped by a fanlight (fan-shaped window) leads to the former home of Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell, in Canonbury Square. He began writing Nineteen Eighty-Four there.

Imagine him taking a break and heading off, perhaps, for a drink in the Fitzroy Tavern, Fitzrovia, where he and Dylan Thomas were patrons. It’s one of various pubs featured, including The Hawley Arms in Camden Town, where Amy Winehouse used to pop behind the bar and pull a few pints.
Charles Dickens’ doorway in Doughty Street, Holborn and Virginia Woolf’s in Fitzroy Square, Bloomsbury, feature, with gen about the authors.

Secret plans were hatched by the Special Operations Executive behind the imposing entrance to Montagu Mansions, Marylebone, in the Second World War.

Doors seen on TV include an unassuming one in North Gower Street, which becomes 221B Baker Street in Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. Florin Court, in Farringdon’s Charterhouse Square, cut a dash as the home of detective Hercule Poirot, played by David Suchet.

Cath said coming across London’s tallest door – at the Elms Lester Painting Rooms, Flitcroft Street – was “a surprise”. This super-sized door on a building completed in 1904, for stage scenery production, allowed huge theatrical backdrops to be moved in and out.

Anyone who has struggled to get a piece of furniture through their door might feel for Sir John Soane, the collector whose house on Lincoln’s Inn Fields, with a studded neo-Roman portal, is now a museum.

Melanie Backe-Hansen

When Soane bought a massive stone sarcophagus he had to knock a hole in the rear wall to get it into his house.

Ancient Egypt influenced design of the former Carreras cigarette factory in Mornington Crescent. Two huge bronze cats guard the doorway of the building, built in the 1920s, when Egyptian themes became popular following the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb.

Few entrances can have seen more change than the gate to what was once the Priory of Clerkenwell, in St. John’s Lane, established in the 1140s. It was later a coffee house – run by Richard Hogarth, father of the artist – a print works and a tavern frequented by artists and writers including Charles Dickens.

Some of the vibrant Camden Town street art featured, including a larger than life chimpanzee by street artist Gnasher, and a surrealistic mural by Spanish artist Tony Boy, has now been painted over.

There’s an array of doorknobs, handles, letterboxes – and door-knockers with designs including Shakespeare’s head, lions’ heads, wreaths and hands.

It’s easy to imagine fingers down the ages rattling them, and bygone figures using the iron light snuffers and boot scrapers by posh entrances.

Do the authors have a favourite door?

Cath said: “I’m a big fan of Art Deco and so my favourites are the doors of Trinity Court – an Art Deco apartment block on Gray’s Inn Road, and also a wonderful starburst glass door in Forest Gate owned by my friends David and Barbara.”

Melanie’s favourite entrances are in Queen Anne’s Gate, Westminster, where several feature ornate door canopies, and Georgian- and Regency-style portals in Marylebone with elaborate fanlights and door surrounds.

She said she lives in a flat with a “rather nondescript door”, which she isn’t able to change.

Cath, who lives in a Victorian terraced house with a bright orange door, said: “The book inspired me to swap my plain round door knocker for a friendly looking brass owl one.”

• Doors of London: Styles, Stories, Art and Architecture. By Cath Harries and Melanie Backe-Hansen, Sheldrake Press, £25