Frederick Crace’s pencilled note beneath the image records that this is “Mr. Crace’s Office 158 Drury Lane”.

Thomas Hosmer Shepherd (1793 – 1864) came to prominence when in 1826, Jones & Co. commissioned a series of views of London’s newest buildings, streets, and squares from him for inclusion in ‘Metropolitan Improvements’ (1827). His now familiar images were subsequently reworked and re-issued Charles Frederick Partington’s ‘Natural History and Views of London’ (1835) and Charles Knight’s ‘London’ (1841–4). Between 1809 and 1859 Frederick Crace commissioned Shepherd to make watercolours of specific London sites

John Gregory Crace, was an interior decorator and antiquarian; author of several essays on the history of wallpaper and of London. In 1880, he sold his and his father Frederick Crace’s (1779-1859) collection of nearly five thousand images of London topography to the British Museum in 1880. The collection had previously been on display (in part) in South Kensington (where it is described in a separately published catalogue of 1879, and by Edward Walford, in ‘Londoniana’, I 1879, pp.274-96). The maps of London, described in ‘A catalogue of maps, plans and views of London, Westminster and Southwark, collected and arranged by Frederick Crace’ (1878) are now in the British Library.