Estates in Bloomsbury
1 Duke of Bedford
2 City of London Corporation
3 Capper Mortimer
4 Fitzroy (Duke of Grafton)
5 Somers
6 Skinners' (Tonbridge)
7 Battle Bridge
8 Lucas
9 Harrison
10 Foundling Hospital
11 Rugby
12 Bedford Charity (Harpur)
13 Doughty
14 Gray's Inn
15 Bainbridge–Dyott (Rookeries)
Area between the Foundling and Harrison estates: Church land
Grey areas: fragmented ownership and haphazard development; already built up by 1800
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About the Duke of Bedford’s Estate
For many people the Bedford estate and Bloomsbury are synonymous, although sales of land in the twentieth century have reduced the original 112 acres to a mere 20 (Survey of London, vol. 5, 1914; Shirley Green, Who Owns London?, 1986)
The Bloomsbury holdings of the Duke of Bedford originated as the estate of Thomas Wriothesley, later Earl of Southampton, who acquired them at the dissolution of the monasteries in 1545 (Camden History Society, Streets of Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia, 1997)
This estate was inherited by Rachel (née Wriothesley), daughter of the fourth Earl of Southampton, when the Southampton title became extinct; it passed into the Russell family, Dukes of Bedford, through her marriage to the heir of the first Duke of Bedford
It was the widow of the fourth Duke, Gertrude Leveson-Gower, who was a prime mover in the residential development of the estate, which began in the late eighteenth century and was continued by her grandson, the fifth Duke, in the early nineteenth century (Camden History Society, Streets of Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia, 1997)
Much of this development was in the form of “wide streets and grand squares fit for the gentry” (Camden History Society, Streets of Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia, 1997); Donald Olsen described it as “the systematic transformation of the pastures of northern Bloomsbury into a restricted upper-middle class suburb” (Donald Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd edn, 1984)
It was a well-timed development;
the Bedford Estate’s Bloomsbury rental was worth about £13,800 in 1805, but jumped to £17,242 in 1806 because of all the new buildings (Donald Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd edn, 1984)
By 1816 it was nearer £25,000, and by 1819 the London rental income was as much as all the other Bedford estates put together; by 1880 it was worth £65,791 (Donald Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd edn, 1984)
The very northern part of the estate was, however, swampy and more difficult to build on, a problem exacerbated by the building slump of the 1830s, which led to areas like Gordon Square being part-developed and left unfinished for decades (Donald Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd edn, 1984)
For the crucial part played by Thomas Cubitt in the development of this estate, see Hermione Hobhouse, Thomas Cubitt: Master Builder (1971)
The size and quality of the houses meant that for the most part, the Bedford estate was never likely to turn into a slum: “Except for Abbey Place and the other narrow courts east of Woburn Place, the Bloomsbury estate had no slums. Even its narrow streets south of Great Russell Street—such as Gilbert, Little Russell, and Silver streets—were, if undeniably lower-class in character, far superior to the streets just west and south of the estate” (Donald Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd edn, 1984)
However, as the area became more popular and convenient as a location for institutions, the Bedford estate had to fight to preserve its genteel residential character; it found itself “with the task of preventing, or at least discouraging, the conversion of dwelling houses into private hotels, boarding houses, institutions, offices, and shops” (Donald Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd edn, 1984)
In 1886 the Bedford steward reported 140 tenement houses in Bloomsbury; Little Russell Street had 21 of them (Donald Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd edn, 1984)
“By the middle of the century many of the huge houses in Bloomsbury had been illegally converted into private hotels...By 1892 Stutfield [the Bedford estate steward] had come to regard Montague Place as a lost cause” (Donald Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd edn, 1984)
By the 1890s, too, the estate had lost the battle to keep itself separate from the flow of traffic and pedestrians, originally enforced by a system of lodges, gates, and residents’ tickets of entry: “The five lodges and gates on the Bloomsbury estate—in Upper Woburn Place, Endsleigh Street, Georgiana Street (later Taviton Street), Gordon Street (originally William Street), and Torrington Place—had all been erected by 1831, presumably by Thomas Cubitt” (Donald Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd edn, 1984)
The removal of all these gates, except the one in Endsleigh Street, was authorised in 1890 by Act of Parliament; that of Endsleigh Street itself was authorised along with any other remaining gates in London in 1893 (Donald Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd edn, 1984)
Developments in transport during the century had affected the estate for decades before the 1890s: “The suburban train and the season ticket reduced the significance of Bloomsbury’s proximity to the City and the Inns of Court. To make matters worse, three of the railways chose to locate their London termini virtually at the entrances to the Bedford estate, thereby depreciating its residential value” (Donald Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd edn, 1984)
However, the estate “was generally successful in keeping bus and tram lines off its residential streets. For a long time the estate was able to exclude omnibuses from Hart Street (now Bloomsbury Way)...The 1806 Bloomsbury Square Act forbade hackney coaches from standing for hire in the square or within 300 feet of it. In 1886 the Bedford Office attempted, without success, to eject the cab ranks that had just been established in Tavistock and Russell squares” (Donald Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd edn, 1984)
The estate’s desire to maintain a certain standard of living for its residents included attention to public health issues: “In 1854 the Duke had made at his own expense sewers in Tavistock Mews, Great Russell Street, Little Russell Street, Gilbert Street, and Rose Street. The estate also was engaged at the time in a programme of installing water closets in the houses on its property, and connecting them with the new sewers, as required by law...In a letter to the Lancet that year the physician to the Bloomsbury Dispensary praised the Duke’s sanitary projects, and attributed to them the mildness of the recent cholera epidemic on his estate” (Donald Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd edn, 1984)
Along with concerns for the health of the residents, the estate continued to try to impose restrictions on what kind of tenants would be allowed in its houses: “The number of public houses and hotels on the estate fell from seventy-four in 1854 to fifty in 1869. By 1889 there were forty-one, and in 1893 only thirty-four...Such practices followed logically from the consistent desire to maintain Bloomsbury as an area of decency, uniformity, restraint, and above all of respectability” (Donald Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd edn, 1984)
The desire to maintain the integrity and amenities of the estate persisted throughout the nineteenth century: “In 1895 the Duke decided to turn the waste ground north of Tavistock Place North and behind the houses in Upper Woburn Place into a lawn tennis ground” for some of the local tenants (Donald Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd edn, 1984)
Efforts to continue development and improvement in response to changing circumstances were assisted by the length of the leases granted on the estate right from the start of residential development in the 1770s: a standard 99 years: thus “[t]he later years of the century saw a great deal of new building in Bloomsbury as the original building leases fell in” (Donald Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd edn, 1984)
The estate seized the opportunity for wholesale redevelopment of streets which were no longer suited to their location or which no longer fulfilled their original purpose, mews premises being a good example of the latter
“In 1880 the estate took down the block of houses between Store Street and Chenies Street, from the City of London’s estate on the west to Chenies Mews on the east...The estate widened Chenies Mews and formed it into the present Ridgmount Street. It proposed to let most of the vacant ground for institutions or factories, as it did not think the location suitable for dwelling houses” (Donald Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd edn, 1984)
“In 1898 and 1899 the estate demolished the whole of the stable premises in Southampton and Montague Mews (between Southampton Row, Bedford Place, and Montague Street) and had the sites landscaped. The Duke had similar plans for Tavistock and Woburn Mews (east of Woburn Place) before he decided to sell the property to the London County Council for a housing scheme” (Donald Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd edn, 1984)
“Far from being typical, the Bedford estate may well have been the best managed urban estate in England” (Donald Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd edn, 1984)
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Gower Street
Also known as Upper Gower Street/Gower Street North
It is mostly on the Duke of Bedford’s estate in the west of Bloomsbury, running from Bedford Square in the south right through to Euston Road in the north
It was developed from the south end in the 1780s and 1790s; the land had been fields and marshy ground until the residential developments of the late eighteenth century
The part formerly known as Gower Street (up to Francis Street) was completed by c. 1790; according to Johnstone’s London Commercial Guide and Street Directory of 1817, there were then 86 houses here
The part formerly known as Upper Gower Street was built between the 1780s and 1819; Johnstone’s London Commercial Guide and Street Directory of 1817 has 31 houses here
The part known as Gower Street North had a couple of buildings on Horwood’s map of 1819, but development in this area was interrupted by the planned Carmarthen Square development and subsequently by the building of UCL
The Gower Street North houses had been built by 1833 (none survives)
It was named after the wife of the fourth Duke of Bedford, who was the daughter of the Earl of Gower
The street was entirely renumbered between 1861 and 1871, with odd numbers on the west side and even numbers on the east side; no house retained its original number
It was part of the generally prestigious residential development of the Bedford estate, and its earliest occupants reflected this
The wealthy wine merchant and philanthropist Benjamin Kenton died at his home here in 1800 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
In 1808 the engineer Richard Trevithick demonstrated a steam locomotive called Catch–me-who-can on a site near the top of Gower Street
No. 62 was the home of the lawyer Joseph Phillimore and his wife Elizabeth (née Bagot), when their son John, the jurist, was born there in 1808 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
In 1810 the well-to-do Patrick Telfer lived here; his daughter Ann married Church of England clergyman Richard Yates (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, entry for Richard Yates)
The physician Peter Mere Latham practised from a house here in the 1810s (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
No. 28 was the family home of architect John Shaw and his wife Elizabeth (née Whitfield); their youngest child, Thomas Budd Shaw, translator of Russian literature, was born here in 1813 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, entry for Thomas Budd Shaw)
The scientist and inventor John Frederic Daniell, later Professor of Chemistry at King’s College, moved to a house here with his wife, Charlotte (née Rule), soon after their marriage in 1817; they had moved out by 1834 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
No. 83 was from 1817 until the late 1830s the base of the painter George Clint. From 1844 to 1854 it was leased by the parents of Sir John Everett Millais so that their then teenage son could train as an artist, and the first meeting of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood took place here (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
No. 53 was the home of Church of England clergyman and former Secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel William Morice, who died there in 1819 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
In the 1820s the translator and teacher of languages on the ‘Hamiltonian system’, James Hamilton, had a house here, where he taught mostly adult pupils (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
The antiquary and book collector Francis Douce, formerly Keeper of Records at the British Museum, also lived here around the 1820s (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
No. 29 (now 91) was the home of architect George Dance the younger, who died there in 1825 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
There was a chapel in Gower Street by the 1820s
At the same time, “Gower Street” became an alternative name for its most famous institution, the University of London, later UCL, being built at the north end of the street from 1827
The chapel subsequently became a focus for clergy opposed to the new “godless institution” of University College, and was still there in 1860
No. 40 Upper Gower Street became in 1827 the family home of landscape painter Peter DeWint, his wife Harriet (née Hilton), whose brother the portrait painter William Hilton also lived with them for some time and died there in 1839; De Wint himself died there in 1849 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
The surgeon and anatomical collector John Heaviside owned a property here at the time of his death in 1828 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
No. 7 Gower Street was the home of solicitor John Burrows and his wife Henrietta (née Carwardine), whose daughter Anne (later Gilchrist, the author) was born there in 1828; the family moved out after the death of John Burrows in 1839 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
No. 2 Gower Street North was the home of Sir Anthony Panizzi from 1828 until he moved into the British Museum in 1837 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
No. 5 was the home of Augustus De Morgan from 1831, where his neighbour was mathematician and reformer William Frend, until he married William’s daughter Sophia Frend in 1837 and the couple moved to 69 Gower Street (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
In the 1830s the former Governor of the Bank of England, bankrupt merchant William Manning, had a house here in “shabby gentility” (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography); he died there in 1835 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
The zoologist Hugh Cuming settled here in the 1830s (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
No. 25 was the home of John Burke of Burke’s Peerage fame around the 1830s (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
William Agutter, Church of England clergyman, died at a house in Upper Gower Street in 1835; he had campaigned against the slave trade (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
No. 65 became the home in retirement of John Bannister, formerly a successful actor, who died there in 1836, and his wife Elizabeth (née Harper), formerly an actress and singer, who also died there in 1849 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
No. 38 Upper Gower Street was the home of chemist and Secretary of the Geological Society Edward Turner, who died here in 1837 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
The Liverpool-born painter and illustrator George Haydock Dodgson lived here from 1837 to 1839 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
No. 69 was the home of Augustus De Morgan and his wife Sophia (née Frend) from 1837; their sons William Frend De Morgan, the potter, and George Campbell De Morgan, a talented mathematician who died young, were born there in 1839 and 1841 respectively, but the family moved to Camden Town in 1844 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
The physician John Cooke died at his house here in 1838 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
No. 7 was home to Dr Frederic Leighton and his wife Augusta in the late 1830s, shortly after the birth of their son Frederic Leighton, the artist, in 1830; the family travelled often and at length, and moved away entirely in 1846 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
In 1839 Grant wrote in his Sketches of London that Gower Street “scarcely exhibits any signs of its being an inhabited place” (cited in Donald Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd edn, 1984), while Ruskin apparently called it the “nec plus ultra of ugliness of street architecture” (quoted in Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London Buildings North, rev. edn, ed. Bridget Cherry, 1998)
Despite this indictment, no. 12 Upper Gower Street was rented by Charles Darwin soon after his marriage to Emma Wedgwood in 1839; their first two children, William Erasmus and Annie, were born there in 1839 and 1841 respectively, but the family moved to Kent in 1842 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
Around 1841 no. 7 Gower Street became the family home and practice of dentist James Robinson and his wife Ann (née Webster); in 1846 Robinson became the first person to demonstrate the use of ether in Britain, for a tooth extraction, at the home next door of his friend, the American physician and botanist Francis Boott (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) and two days later Robert Liston used ether at University College
At the time, according to the 1841 Post Office directory, Gower Street was dominated by professional residents, particularly physicians and surgeons, but also attorneys, barristers, and architects; Messrs Baker and Harris had an architectural practice here in the mid nineteenth century (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, entry for Frederick Walker)
The sculptor Edgar Papworth, nephew of architect John Buonarotti Papworth, was listed at no. 83 in the 1841 Post Office directory
The United Patriots National Benefit Society was founded in North Gower Street in 1843
No. 18 Upper Gower Street was the home and practice of George Man Burrows, specialist in the treatment of insanity, who died there in 1846 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
In 1847 the occupant of no. 64 Gower Street was physician Edward Ballard; the death of his baby daughter was reported in the Court Magazine and Monthly Critic of 1 October 1847
In fact, medical men were the main residents of the street at this time, according to the 1851 Post Office directory, which shows numerous dentists, surgeons, and physicians, as well as Professors of Music and Dancing in Gower Street North, the university booksellers Lewis, artists, solicitors, an architect, and suppliers of tobacco, wine, and beer
The epidemiologist Sir George Buchanan had a private practice here in the 1850s (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
In 1854 no. 5 was home to the botanist Nathaniel Wallich (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
No. 7 Upper Gower Street, subsequently renumbered 100 Gower Street, was home to George Pycock Green, the historian, and his wife Mary Anne Everett Green (née Wood), also an historian; their daughter Evelyn Ward Everett-Green, the author of books for girls, was born there in 1856, and attended Mrs Bolton’s preparatory school in the same street (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
Another daughter of the Greens, Gertrude, married the Rev. Dr James Gow, a headmaster, and they also lived at no. 100; their eldest son Andrew, later a classical scholar, was born there in 1886, but it was still described as the home of Mary Anne Everett Green when she died there in 1895 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
Gower Street School, formerly Bedford College School, was here from the 1850s; Lucy Harrison moved here after becoming a partner in 1870 in this school, and later became its headmistress from 1875 to 1888 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
No. 30 Upper Gower Street was the home of artist Emily Osborn and her family from 1855 to about 1865; it was renumbered 133 Gower Street in 1864 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
No. 18 was the home of genre painter Abraham Solomon; he shared it with his brother Simeon and sister Rebecca, both of whom were also artists, from 1856 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
No. 14 Upper Gower Street was the home of the actor and walking-stick collector John Pritt Harley, who died penniless there in 1858 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
No. 74 was the home from around 1861 of Sir Charles Newton, Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities in the British Museum from 1861, and his wife Mary (née Severn) an artist (and daughter of the artist Joseph Severn) who died there in 1866 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
Gower Street underground station (now Euston Square), on the Metropolitan line, was opened in 1863; in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the playwright Gilbert Á Beckett fell down the steps there and was partially paralysed for the rest of his life (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
The formerly separate streets of Upper Gower Street and Gower Street North were incorporated into Gower Street when the entire street was renumbered in the 1860s
No. 20 Upper Gower Street was the home of art patron Lewis Pocock and his wife Eliza (née Bassett) in the mid nineteenth century; they moved to 70 Gower Street in 1869 and Lewis Pocock died at that house in 1882 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
No. 27 was the home of William Weld Wren in 1870; his daughter Fanny married Church of England clergyman W. C. E. Newbolt that year (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, entry for W. C. E. Newbolt)
Dawson Clark had a crammer here in the 1870s (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, entry for Sir Charles Henry Hawtrey)
“By the late 1870s, when most of the original leases were falling in, the older inhabitants had left the street, and ‘nearly every house was occupied as a lodging or boarding house,’ ” according to the Bedford estate steward, John Bourne (cited in Donald Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd edn, 1984); he claimed to have stamped out this element by 1887 but in 1889 a Mrs Lawson was still operating two lodging-houses
No. 8 was the home of stamp dealer Stanley Gibbons in 1876 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
No. 78 was the home of Scottish journalist James Macdonell (brother of Sir John Macdonell), who died there in 1879 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
No. 54 was the home of eminent surgeon Luther Holden until about 1880, when he retired and moved to Ipswich (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
In the early 1880s the Jewish educationalist and pioneer of the Froebel system Esther Ella Lawrence opened a kindergarten here, before moving to Chiswick High School in 1884 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
In the 1880s the artist and engraver (and illustrator of novels by George Eliot) Edmund Morison Wimperis moved here with his wife Anne (née Edmonds) (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
No. 2 Gower Street was where Dame Millicent Fawcett (née Garrett) moved with their daughter Philippa after the death of her husband Henry Fawcett in 1884; they shared the house with Fawcett’s sister Agnes, who ran a house-decorating firm, and took in “waifs and strays of art”, according to Ethel Smyth (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
No. 94 was the home of the philologist Hensleigh Wedgwood, cousin of Charles Darwin, who died there in 1891 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
The 1891 census lists Alexander Stuart Murray at no. 54; Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum, he lived there with his wife Anne and a predominantly Scottish household, although his residence there is not mentioned in his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
At no. 58 in the 1891 census was a lodging-house run by an American, John A. Haller, while at no. 72 was the Ladies’ Embroidery Teaching Guild, headed by Mary E. Cutts, Sister of Mercy of the Community of St John the Baptist
No. 52 was one of two linked houses shared by photographer Alice Mary Hughes and her father (portrait painter Edward Hughes) in the late nineteenth century; she opened a photographic portrait studio here in 1891, and it also remained her father’s home until he died here in 1908 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
“In 1894 Stutfield was involved in a struggle with another tenant in the [Gower] street, who was not only carrying on the business of a photographer but had built without authorization a series of one-story brick buildings over the garden of his house” (Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd edn, 1984); this must have been the Hughes house and studio at no. 52
No. 95 was the home of the first Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College, W. P. Ker, in the late nineteenth century (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
In 1901 a bequest enabled the social campaigner Violet Markham, granddaughter of Joseph Paxton, to move to no. 8 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)
Throughout the twentieth century it remained a mixture of residential homes, the main campus and associated institutions of UCL, and hotels
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