From the Wikipedia page on John Thorpe > Thorpe's major-but-little-trumpeted contribution to world architecture is the humble and now-ubiquitous corridor "for a house[3] in Chelsea", London, England, in 1597,[4] allowing "independent access to individual rooms". Previously, the fashion was the so-called enfilade arrangement of rooms in a dwelling in which each room led to the next via connecting internal doors. The enfilade remained popular in continental Europe long after the corridor was widely adopted in England. Flanders believes Thorpe's inspiration was the one-sided covered walkway common in monastic cloisters. Given their similarities, this is a reasonable prima facie conjecture.