Soho: A Street Guide to Soho’s History, Architecture and People by Dan Cruickshank

Soho: A Street Guide to Soho’s History, Architecture and People by Dan Cruickshank

Author:Dan Cruickshank [Cruickshank, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780297869337
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2019-11-14T00:00:00+00:00


Wardour Street (south)

This southern part of Wardour Street was, as we have noted, traditionally known as Colman Hedge Lane, then from the late 1670s as Princes Street. To the north, the central part of Wardour Street was named Old Soho (as on Rocque’s map of 1746), with only the north end known as Wardour Street (as on Richard Horwood’s map of 1819). This commemorated the fact that the adjoining Colman Hedge Close came into the possession of Sir Edward Wardour in 1630 (see here). It was only in 1878 that the name Wardour Street was applied to the whole length of ancient Colman Hedge Lane from Oxford Street to Coventry Street. The length of the lane south of Coventry Street is still called Whitcomb Street.

When the parish of St Anne’s, Soho, was created in 1686 from part of the ancient parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Wardour Street/Princes Street was used to mark the western boundary with the parish of St James’s, Westminster. The ground – known as the ‘Leastall’ or Laystall – immediately to the west of the south end of Wardour Street became, in 1676, the freehold property of the Earl of St Albans, with development largely completed by the late 1680s (see here). Rebuilding generally took place during the 1720s and 1730s.

Numbers 7, 9 and 11 Wardour Street date from 1727 and were built on a lease granted in 1725 by George Bourne (who had recently acquired the freehold of the Vesey’s Garden portion of the former St Albans estate) to Henry Parsons, a local watchmaker trying his hand at a modest piece of property speculation. Two late-seventeenth-century buildings stood on the site and these were cleared away and the three smaller houses built. This was the typical pattern of Soho redevelopment in the late 1720s – larger seventeenth-century houses being replaced by smaller, new houses aimed at lower-income tenants. Numbers 9 and 7 were built as a pair with a mirrored plan and have a yellow-brick façade and segmental-shaped brick arches over their windows. Number 9 was long occupied by Benjamin Smart and members of his family, goldsmiths and dealers in bullion, which explains the inscription on the façade – ‘Exchange and Bullion Office’. Number 11 is more altered.

Number 25 is a house of c.1800.

Numbers 27–31 form a very picturesque group because 27 and 29 incorporate a memorable two-storey-high entrance arch to Rupert (originally George) Court, which leads to Rupert Street. The houses were built in 1728 on a fifty-one-year building lease granted to the bricklayer John Whetten by George Bourne. The façades of the Wardour Street houses have been altered and stuccoed, but it’s worth trying to get inside because number 27 retains 1720s panelling in its main first-floor room and the upper portion of its original staircase. Numbers 29 and 31 also have significant amounts of their 1720s internal detailing, including panelling and staircases. Numbers 22–28 Rupert Street were part of the same Bourne development and built at the same time (see here).

Numbers 41 and 42



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