The archway and the undertaker.

The carriage arch cut through the ground floor of number twenty-two is the reason the house looks the way it does today. Around 1870, when the property was divided in two, the archway was raised to allow carriages through to the yards behind, and the whole façade was recased in Victorian stucco to disguise the awkward new floor levels above.

The tenant on the far side of the arch, from 1871 for the next fifty-five years, was James Rafter - a horse-trader whose family kept stables, a forge and offices in the rear yards. In 1882 the freehold passed to William Fanagan.

Fanagan had taken over the funeral house at number fifty-four Aungier Street from a man called Boland in 1858. He kept the archway at twenty-two, and used the yards behind it as the garage for his undertaking business - a use that ran on through the nineteen-fifties and is still recorded on Goad's 1961 fire-insurance map. Fanagan's the funeral directors are still trading a few doors down.

The stables came down around 1980. The archway is still there. It is the way you now walk from Aungier Street to the walled garden at the back of the house.