Poland Street, W1F
Soho
Credit: User unknown/public domain
Poland Street was named for the former King of Poland Inn, situated as its northern end.

In 1690, James Pollett started granting building leases for plots of land in an area known as Little Gelding’s Close. The new street was designed to be "thirty feet wide and extended from the house or inn known by the sign of the King of Poland in Tyburn Road" (now Oxford Street).

The ’King of Poland’ inn was named in honour of Poland’s King John III Sobieski in the heading of a coalition of western armies, crucially defeated the invading Ottoman forces at the 1683 Battle of Vienna. During the eighteenth century, Polish Protestants settled around Poland Street as religious refugees fleeing the Polish Counterreformation.

The King of Poland pub was destroyed by a bomb in 1940. Notable residents include Henry Howard, 6th Earl of Suffolk, who lived at No. 15 in 1717, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who briefly lodged on the street in 1811. William Blake lived at No. 28 from 1785 to 1791, writing several works there, including Songs of Innocence and The Book of Thel. The street was also the site of the St James Workhouse, whose infirmary is believed to be the predecessor of the St James Infirmary.

In 1934, London’s first multi-storey car park opened on Poland Street.

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