Chapter 27: Margaret Street

DRAFT CHAPTER 27 Margaret Street In 1742 the Daily Advertiser ran a notice inviting offers for a collection of shells ‘fit either for the Cabinet, Grotto, Frame, or Flower Work’ to be viewed at a house near Oxford Market at the east end of Margaret Street, ‘a Pedestal in Shell-Work over the door’.1 That may be the first public reference to Margaret Street. By then this street of four blocks, running east out of the south corner of Cavendish Square up to the edge of the Cavendish–Harley estate at Wells Street, was well on its way to completion. It had acquired its name by the time the original estate layout was published by John Prince back in 1719 (see Ill. ##/##). It commemorated the 2nd Earl of Oxford’s four-year-old daughter Lady Margaret Harley, whose marriage to the 2nd Duke of Portland at the Oxford Chapel fifteen years later brought the property into the Cavendish- Bentinck family. Had Prince’s plan been followed, Margaret Street would have been shorter, terminating after just two blocks in a large square, ‘Marybone Place’, intended for a market on the axis of Great Portland Street. But the revised plan of the early 1720s, made or influenced by James Gibbs, reduced the size of what became Oxford Market, leaving Margaret Street free to run on eastwards to the estate border. Development at either end of the street started in the 1720s, more firmly at the western end, beyond Bolsover and Edward Streets. It continued apace throughout the 1730s, so that by the time of the Daily Advertiser notice, head leases had been granted for the whole north side except for the future sites of All Saints Church and Audley House (Nos 9–12). Opposite, progress Survey of London © Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London Website: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/architecture/research/survey-london 1 DRAFT east of Great Portland Street was less even, faltering after 1737. After two head leases were granted in 1743 (of Nos 69–71), the rest followed intermittently in the 1750s apart from No. 84 (the All Saints school site), leased as late as 1769.2 The south side of Margaret Street in the vicinity of the pre-existing Marylebone Passage consequently became a ragbag of semi- industrial premises and yards. Few of the takes offered in this leasing process amounted to more than three or four house-plots. Many of the original head lessees were familiar from elsewhere on the Cavendish–Harley estate, like John Devall (Nos 18, 21- 22 and 62–64), George Mercer (Nos 13–17 and 46), William Wilton (Nos 19 and 20) and the ubiquitous Thomas Huddle (Nos 8–12 and 72–74). The biggest single taker was the joiner John Lane, who developed the sites of Nos 23–28 and 51–54 opposite in 1735–6. His ground included the street’s most enduring pub, The Cock at the north-west corner with Great Portland Street, leased in 1735.3 The lack of remaining buildings predating the second half of the nineteenth century means that little can be said about Margaret Street’s early appearance, but it was probably humdrum. The one exception to the ordinary run of houses was the Margaret Street Chapel, built around 1752 between Nos 8 and 9 as a dissenters’ chapel and little above humdrum itself. The nineteenth-century saw this chapel and its surroundings transformed into London’s leading Anglo-Catholic church. Margaret Street was a mixed street. In its early years it attracted a few gentry, particularly along the north side west of Great Titchfield Street. One house here, John Devall’s No. 18, was exceptionally wide, with an ample garden behind, and therefore appealed to grandees such as the 6th Earl of Denbigh in the 1760s, and the Earl of Euston (future 4th Duke of Grafton) in the 1790s and early 1800s.4 Further west, Nos 27–29 were also highly rated houses built by John Lane in the late 1730s. The staircase compartment of No. 28 was recorded by the Belcher & Joass assistant C. D. Carus-Wilson before the house was destroyed in 1908, and published in Mervyn Macartney’s Survey of London © Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London Website: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/architecture/research/survey-london 2 DRAFT Practical Exemplar of Architecture. It had an oak stair with triple balusters on each step and ornamental plasterwork on the walls and ceiling. The oakwork was partly reused in Macartney’s country home, Kennet Orley, Woolhampton, Berkshire, but the plasterwork was ‘entirely ruined in removal’. The next-door house, No. 29, was leased by Lane in 1738 to Lady Elizabeth Montagu.5 Early Margaret Street residents of note included the writer William Duncombe, who died at a house here in 1769; the architect John Soane, a lodger at No. 53 in 1781–3 and tenant of No. 50, 1783–6; Thomas Jervais, the pre-eminent stained-glass painter of his day, at No. 69, c.1773–83, before he moved to Windsor to work on St George’s Chapel; and the military engineer General Hugh Debbieg, at No. 53 from the late 1790s till his death in 1810. Artists included George Carter, painter, at No. 31, c.1777–85; George Townly Stubbs, engraver, at No. 48, 1777; and Robert Fulton, portraitist and later inventor of the steamboat, at No. 67, 1791.6 The quotient of tradespeople was strong by the end of the eighteenth century, some doubtless already drawn by the magnet of Oxford Street’s shops. Insurance records of the 1790–1840 period show dressmakers, staymakers, milliners and hairdressers in several Margaret Street houses. Other well-represented trades were coach-building and coach-painting.7 For a while the scruffy east end of the south side hosted some notable manufacturers. Jervais may have been the first, at No. 69. An estate survey of about 1805 shows a large open yard surrounded by ‘Chiesley’s Agricultural Implement Manufactory’ (Robert Chislie & Co., according to the ratebooks); then, just further east, Henry Maudslay, ‘mechanist’, cheek by jowl with Schweppe & Company’s mineral water warehouse on the later convent site (Ill. 27/1). Maudslay moved into Margaret Street from his first independent premises round the corner at 64 Wells Street in 1802, remaining till 1810. In these years this pioneer of the British machine-tool industry was employing up to 80 men and making his celebrated block-making machinery for Survey of London © Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London Website: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/architecture/research/survey-london 3 DRAFT Portsmouth Dockyard in forges behind the frontage.8 For the Schweppes company this was their fourth London address. Jacob (sometimes called James) Schweppe from Geneva had originally opened a London branch for his carbonated water in 1792 at Drury Lane, then after one brief move took on 11 Margaret Street in 1795. The shift to larger premises across the road seems to have coincided with Schweppe’s retirement in 1798–9 in favour of three Channel Islanders, H. W. & F. C. Lauzun and R. C. Brohier, who continued the business here under Schweppe’s name until 1831, when it moved to 51 Berners Street. Changes in numbering at this haphazard end of the street make the addresses of these premises confusing. Maudslay is shown on the estate map as at No. 75, but that had altered to 78 before he left. Schweppes are advertised in 1804 as at No. 75, yet the estate map puts them at No. 76 and by 1818 they are at No. 79, a number which appears on surviving Schweppes bottles. The ratebooks give different numberings again but no change of premises seems to have been involved. Later, between 1838 and 1870, a back building occupied by the Irish sculptor Patrick MacDowell as his studio is variously numbered as 74A, 75 and 78.9 The planning and building of Regent Street between 1813 and 1823 broke the unity of Margaret Street and its relation to Cavendish Square, leaving a rump of houses at the west end beyond the new street, all on the south side (Nos 34–40). Several houses were demolished during the process, including No. 42, from about 1797 the home of the painters Charles Hayter and his son George.10 The street was left with gaps in the numbering as a result. Property on the north side of Margaret Street east of Great Titchfield Street was damaged by a severe fire in 1825, which caused havoc in the middle of the block as far east as Wells Street. In 1844–5 the builder John Kelk, successor to William Newton, carpenter, who had premises at No. 12 on the north-east corner with Great Titchfield Street and yards behind, moved his base to South Street, Grosvenor Square, and redeveloped the Margaret Street Survey of London © Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London Website: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/architecture/research/survey-london 4 DRAFT frontage, tucking in three extra houses west of Nos 9–11.11 It was also Kelk, soon to gain fame as a public works contractor, who secured the contract for the more dramatic change a few doors eastwards, the replacement of the Margaret Chapel and its neighbours with All Saints in 1850–2. By a short head the church was preceded by a synagogue further west, tucked away in 1848–9 on back land between Nos 48 and 50 on the south side, between Regent and Great Portland Streets. If more discreet, this project too was not without ambition.

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