Wigmore Street
DRAFT CHAPTER 9 Wigmore Street Wigmore Street today is something of a racetrack, sucking up the traffic that might otherwise choke car-free Oxford Street, two streets to the south. It runs west to Portman Square, but only the eastern portion is dealt with here: on the south side up to No. 6, and on the north up to No. 92, at the boundaries of the former City of London’s Banqueting House Ground and Hope–Edwardes estate (see page ###). Also included are Easley’s Mews at the west end, Wigmore Place to the east, and the former Mill Hill Place to the south. Most of the north side belongs to the Howard de Walden Estate, as does the block immediately west of Cavendish Square on the south. Shown on John Prince’s plan (page ###) and named after the Harley family’s Herefordshire property Wigmore Castle, Wigmore Street was mostly built up between 1730 and 1760. Eighteenth-century remains are fragmentary and hidden, immured behind façades dating from the extensive rebuilding on the Portland–Howard de Walden estate carried out in 1880–1910. In execution, the layout was changed from Prince’s plan when Welbeck and Wimpole Streets were projected south to Henrietta Place. It was on the south side between these streets that Wigmore Street’s development began in 1729. ‘As the Market-house encouraged Building on the East end of the Estate, so did the Chapell at the West end,’ and by 1738 ‘considerable progress’ had been made.1 When work ground to a halt two years later the sites from modern-day No.
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