Hatton Garden is a shopping street and commercial area in the London Borough of Camden. The area, which is London’s principle diamond and jewellery quarter, is located in Holborn, on the fringe of London’s West End. It takes its name from Sir Christopher Hatton, a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, who gained possession of the garden and orchard of the Bishops of Ely and established a mansion on the site. It remained in the Hatton family and was built up as a stylish residential development in the reign of King Charles II. For some decades it often went, outside of the main street, by an alternative name St Alban's Holborn, after the local church built in 1861.

St Etheldreda's Church in Ely Place, all that survives of the old Bishop's Palace, is one of only two remaining buildings in London dating from the reign of Edward I. It is one of the oldest churches in England now in use for Roman Catholic worship, which was re-established there in 1879. The red-brick building now known as Wren House, at the south-east corner of Hatton Garden and St Cross Street, was the Anglican church for the Hatton Garden development. It was taken over by the authorities of a charity school, and the statues of a boy and girl in uniform were then added.

Surrounding streets including Hatton Place and Saffron Hill were improved during the 20th century and in modern times have been developed with blocks of 'luxury' apartments, including Da Vinci House (occupying the former Punch magazine printworks) and the architecturally distinctive Ziggurat Building.

The Hatton Garden area between Leather Lane in the west and Saffron Hill in the east, and from Holborn in the south to Hatton Wall in the north, was developed as a new residential district in the Restoration period, between 1659 and 1694. It arose soon after the residential developments in Covent Garden and was contemporary with those of Bloomsbury Square.

It was formerly the site of the medieval London residence of the Bishops of Ely, and included a medieval palace, gardens and orchard. The palace stood on the site of Ely Place. During the 1570s Queen Elizabeth's Chancellor and favourite, Sir Christopher Hatton, held a lease of part of the site and developed Hatton House to the northwest of the palace. In 1581, he obtained a more permanent grant from Queen Elizabeth during a vacancy in the see, and after his death, it passed into the possession of Lady Elizabeth Hatton, the widow of Sir Christopher's nephew Sir William Newport (who changed his name to Hatton). At her death in 1646, during the English Civil War, it reverted to Christopher Hatton, 1st Baron Hatton, a close associate of Charles II in his exile in Paris during the Commonwealth period, 1649–1660.

The bishops disputed the Hattons' title, but, under the Protectorate, Bishop Matthew Wren was a prisoner in the Tower of London, and the palace itself was sequestrated to Parliamentarian uses and was badly damaged. To raise money Lord Hatton granted a long lease of the site in 1654, which became effectively permanent in 1658, though he retained the freehold. In 1659, John Evelyn observed Hatton Street (Hatton Garden road) being laid out from south to north, hard against the west side of the palace, as the beginning of a newly planned town district. Speculative builders took leases to construct tall and spacious adjoining houses to attract wealthy men at court, city officials and country gentlefolk wanting London homes, convenient for Clerkenwell and the Inns of Court.

In this way a varied but harmonious townscape, with attractive detail of porches and interior panelling, grew up on a rectangular grid of new streets. Charles Street (at first called Cross Street) was laid west to east as a continuation of Greville Street, and the Bishops' orchard, which (as shown in Richard Newcourt's map of 1658) the Hattons had laid out as a walled knot garden with a central fountain, lay north of that up to Hatton Wall. Hatton Street followed the line of its central path. By 1666, the year of the Great Fire, the development had advanced north to form two principal blocks up to the line of St Cross Street (then called Little Kirby Street). The remaining open land was used as a refuge by Londoners escaping the Fire, which did not consume Hatton Garden.

After Lord Hatton's death in 1670, the northern sector up to Hatton Wall was completed by 1694, in the time of his son Sir Christopher Hatton, 1st Viscount Hatton, whose agent was the noted accountant Stephen Monteage (1623–1687). Work on the Hatton Street church (now Wren House) commenced in 1685–86. Great Kirby Street, parallel to Hatton Street on the east side, enclosed a central block with rear gardens backing, but in the northern sectors, Hatt and Tunn Yard on the east (on the site of Hatton Place) and other small yards on the west provided access to smaller dwellings and coach houses. In the southern sectors King's Head Yard (later Robin Wood Yard, Robin Hood Yard) was similarly enclosed to the west, and to the east Bleeding Heart Yard (Arlidge's Yard, with Union Court) was developed near the palace by Abraham Arlidge (1645–1717), a carpenter of Kenilworth (Warwickshire) origins who worked extensively on the project and made his fortune by judicious investments. Arlidge's survey of 1694 shows the completed estate in detail: he succeeded Sir John Cass as Master of the Worshipful Company of Carpenters in 1712.