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Thomas Fisher bought the Red Lion Inn on High Holborn from Sir William Harpur for £850 in 1596. With the hostelry came Red Lion Field, a 17-acre paddock crossed by footpaths that came to be known as Fishers’ Walks. The high price of the inn gives some clue as to what a thriving enterprise it, as the area’s main hostelry, was. The last of the Fishers to own the land was Thomas’s grandson Sir Richard Fisher, who leased it in the early 17thCentury to the unscrupulous building speculator Nicholas Barbon who, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, built houses all over Red Lion Fields without always obtaining the permission of the legal owner first.