This old galleried inn on the north side of Holborn was of great interest and picturesqueness. The earliest notice of it which has come to the writer's knowledge was on the 14th of March, 1538 (30 Hen. VIII.), when William Barde sold a messuage and garden called the Bell, in the parish of St. Andrew, Holborn, to Richard Hunt, citizen and girdler. Richard Hunt, who died in 1569, gave thirty sacks of charcoal yearly for ever, as a charge on the property, to be distributed on St. Thomas's Day to thirty poor persons of the parish, one half below and the other above Bars: now represented by an annual payment of £2 5s. from the ground landlords to St. Andrew's parish.
On February 20th, 1605, by deed poll, Thomas Hunt, citizen and vintner of London, son and heir of Richard Hunt, releases to John Corder, citizen and vintner, all his right in that messuage "called the Bell with the appurtenances in the parish of St. Andrew, Holborne, in the suburbes of the cittie of London, between the tenement sometime of John Davye on the east, and a tenement heretofore of the Prior and convent of the late dissolved Pryorie or Hospitall of our Ladie without Bishopsgate" (which must have been the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, sometimes called Bedlam) "on the west; one head thereof extending upon the Kinge's high waye of Holborne, and the other head thereof upon the garden of Elie place." After various changes of ownership the property in 1679-80 passed into the hands of Ralph Gregge, whose family came from Bradley in Cheshire. His grandson, Joseph, finally parted with it, May 3rd, 1725, to Christ's Hospital, for £2,113 15s. In the deed of sale three houses are mentioned, so the various parts were let separately. They are described as "formerly one great mansion-house or inn, commonly known by the name of the Bell or Blue Bell Inn." A very short time, probably two years, before this sale the front of the premises facing Holborn had been rebuilt, a small part to the west being turned into a shop, latterly occupied by a silversmith. The sculptured arms, not as sometimes has been asserted, of the Fowlers of Islington (who had never been connected with the house), but of the Gregges, then owners, were built into the wall. These arms are now in the Guildhall Museum.