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Did you know? Pullens Yards

Find out more about Pullens Open Studios just round the corner from Elephant Park. Pullens Yard open studios 2019, discover more.

Arts and culture
  • 2 Dec 2019
Just around the corner from Elephant & Castle tube station, in the heart of SE17, you will find Pullens Yards – unique 19th century residential workspaces still used to this day by creatives and artists.
Thomas Middleton was a renowned 17th century poet and playwright, who lived in Newington, Southwark.

The industrious – and sometimes controversial – writer was one of the few dramatists of his time to achieve equal success in both comedy and tragedy.

Born in 1580, he gained a reputation for describing people as he saw them, with comic gusto or searching irony. By the turn of the 17th century, Middleton had spent two years at Oxford and had published three books of verse.

His comedies were said to have “exposed bourgeois vice in contemporary London in a satiric tone”.

And his highly acclaimed tragicomedy, ‘The Changeling’, which he wrote in the mid-17th century with William Rowley, continues to be performed to this day.

Middleton also served as Chronologer of the City of London from 1620 until his death in 1627, and wrote many pageants for the Lord Mayor. He is buried in St Mary’s Churchyard.