Gower Street and All That
By WILSON HARRIS I AVING long held that both history and geography should, like another most laudable practice, begin near home, I have of late been investigating, not very pro- foundly, the past of the locality in which for a considerable number of years I have worked and had my being—in a word, Gower Street ; in another word, Number 99.
First as to "all that," by which I mean the rectangle, or quadrilateral, bounded by Tottenham Court Road on the west, Euston Road on the north, Woburn and. Tavistock Places on the east and Great Russell Street on the south. In the middle of the eighteenth century—a couple of hundred years ago—these thoroughfares enclosed oigy green fields, part of Lamb's Conduit Fields, for Great Russell"Street represented London's northern- most extension at that point (it had gone a little further north on east and west). Great Russell Street itself was occupied for all its length by two great houses, Bedford House on the east and Montague House, taken over for the new British Museum in 1753 and pulled down to make room for the present Museum buildings in the eighteen-twenties. The Duke of Bedford was one of the two great ducal landlords who divided most of the area between them, and left their imprint in the names which various squares and streets still bear—in the south, the Bedford domain, Russell, Tavistock, Woburn, Endsleigh and others ; in the north-west, where the chief landlord was the Duke of Grafton, Euston, Fitzroy (the family name) and Warren. Tottenham Court Road has had a varied history. It ran from St. Giles' in the Fields up to Hampstead and on to Barnet and the north. The scene of Hogarth's well-known picture, "The March of the Guards to Finchley " (in 1745), was what is now the cross-roads at the junction of Tottenham Court, Hampstead and Euston Roads, with what was then, and is still. the 'Adam and Eve' on one side and what was then, and is not still, the 'King's Head' on the other. These hostelries were well into the country, for the octagonal Whitefield's Tabernacle, which when it took shape was the northernmost building in Tottenham Court Road, was not constructed till 1756. From its adjacent grave- yard -a healthy body-snatching industry was carried on, in a sellers' market. To the north of it after that date, and a little to the south of it before that date, all that existed was a road, bordered by hawthorn hedges, running through fields. But to the south there was one other building of some note. On the spot where the Scala Theatre now stands was a playhouse which during a history of a h'undred and thirty years bore many names. It began as Pasquali's Concert Han, but soon blossomed into a fashionable theatre, at one time the Queen's, at one time the Prince of Wales', with a royal box for George Ill and Queen Charlotte. Ellen Terry played Portia there in 1875, and the Squire Bancrofts popularised it a decade later. Whitefield's itself shed no aura of sanctity over the vicinity. All too close to it were booths and an amphitheatre devoted mainly to prize-fighting, and at different places on the road at different dates Tottenham Fair and Gooseberry Fair mixed •the reputable and the disreputable in such proportions that the latter more commonly predominated.
And so north to the 'Adam and Eve.' There was nothing at all disreputable about that rural retreat, where decent citizens used to repair and eat fruit and cream, eased down by relatively innocuous beverages, on Sunday afternoons. But across the way, predecessor of the 'King's Head' already mentioned, stood once an earlier and far more historic building—Tothele Manor, which carries us at once right back to Domesday Book. (It also, inci- dentally, carries us forward, for. Tothele becoming corrupted to Tottenhall and later to Tottenham, and Manor being replaced by Court, the road running south from it got its name ready- made.) Tothele was one of the four manors into which the parish of St. Pancras was divided, and in the eleventh century— Domesday Book date—it supported four villeins, three cottars or bondars (cultivators rather less tightly bound) and provided pannage for 150 swine. In Elizabeth's reign the Queen's chief cook, Daniel Clarke, held the manor, which was throughout a prebend of St. Paul's.
East from the 'Adam and Eve' ran The New Road from Paddington to Islington, following, as regards that portion of it. the line of the present Euston and Pentonville Roads, after which the City Road took it on to the Bank. The road was built in the seventeen-fifties with the backing of the Duke of Grafton, against the opposition of the Duke of Bedford, who thought the clouds of dust raised by traffic would spoil the hitherto unimpeded view of the Hampstead heights from his mansion in Great Russell Street. But the road was needed to relieve the pressure on the Oxford Road, to the south, of the herds and flocks driven from the west for London's sustenance. So constructed it was, and along it in 1829 drove the first known omnibus, Mr. Shillibeer's, plying from the Yorkshire Stingo in Paddington to the Bank for a modest shilling. But a shilling would buy more in those days, and took more earning. Some attempt, incidentally, was made here to avoid the worst kind of ribbon-development, in a provision that any houses built along the new road must be separated from it by gardens fifty feet long. Signs of them are still there.
Of the Duke of Bedford's New Road, which connected the Paddington and Islington New Road, at the point where St. Pancras Church now stands, with Great Russell Street, not much need be said, except that it completes the quadrilateral. The Duke of Bedford regarded it as a private road when first con- structed, and it appears to have been little used. The space inside the quadrilateral was developed only gradually. Behind Montague House the Field of Forty Steps was one of the favourite resorts of duellists, and further north, near the site of the University College of today, the Toxophilite Society had its butts, and there the arrows long flew till the advance of the builder, in 1805, drove the archers to a new home further west.
Much of the area in the rectangle was filled with squares. The principal single thoroughfare was Gower Street, running north from the Oxford Road to the Paddington and Islington New Road. It claims no great antiquity, the south part of it dating little further back than 1800, with the northern extension con- structed later still. It was mainly residential, and in some of the gardens grapes and nectarines ripened in the open air. Lord Eldon lived at No. 42, and at different dates Sir Samuel Romilly was at No. 54, Charles Dickens at No. 4, Charles Darwin (on his marriage to Emma Wedgwood) at No. 100, Sir John Millais at No. 83. Sir Edward Poynter at No. 106. Altogether a highly genteel, not to say cultured, locality.
Of public buildings the earliest was an Independent chapel, now absorbed in Messrs. Maple's premises, but with its facade still plainly visible, founded in 1820 by a breakaway faction from the Rev. William Huntington's chapel in Great Titchfield Street. But far more important, just across the road, is University College, founded in 1826 (University College Hospital came some ten years later) by Lord Brougham, Jeremy Bentham and others, to provide a university education for students who, not being members of the Church of England, had no entry to Oxford or Cambridge. Extending southward, the college obliterated the house where Richard Trevithick worked out his plans for the first steam locomotive to carry passengers (not on rails) and gave it its trials in the fields behind. A bronze plaque now commemorates this.
But the hub and centre of Gower Street is, of course, No. 99, of which (except as regards recent years) there is, deplorably enough, little that is not discreditable to relate. For it was here, no more than half a century ago, that an adventuress of the worst type, who claimed to be the daughter of Lola Montez and the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, took rooms and started a "College of Life and Occult Sciences," which later developed into the "Order of the Golden Dawn," as cover for practices of which a current journal remarked (most disappointingly) that "the details are too revolting to relate "—this in the very room in which today Spectator leaders are written and Janus pens pain- fully his pedestrian paragraphs. The lady, known (not on her merits) as Angel Anna, had been many times married, mostly in the United States, but by a convenient coincidence, or -not, she was usually widowed within about a year. But at No. 99 she overstepped too many limits, and after a trial at Old Bailey, in which Sir Edward Carson, among other counsel; figured, she dis- appeared (in December, 1901) from public gaze for seven years, and after that period, from history—returning, it was assumed, to the United States, there to be reduced to an anonymous ingredient in that unique melting-pot.
Who, after this, will call Gower Street a dull thoroughfare ?
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