The land here was owned and managed by the City Lands Estates of the Corporation of London. They might have been in use as allotment gardens.

London was enjoying an economic boom in the late 18th century partly due to trade with the Americas. There was a demand for quality housing for wealthy merchants.

Sir Benjamin Hammett, a city alderman and property developer acquired the lease for this land. He commissioned the architect George Dance the Younger (1741-1825) to design a speculative residential development to appeal to merchants to reside in the City, near the docks.

It was successful and other architects, such as John Nash’s proceeded to link circuses, crescents and squares in the same way in the West End.

America Square and Crescent were built at the same time as Circus. George Dance was probably influenced by John Wood’s development at Bath and was responsible for the introduction into London of squares, circuses and straight streets.

Dance would repeat this idea a decade later with Finsbury Circus and Finsbury Square some ten years later.

In 1841, the City of London’s first railway station - Fenchurch Street - opened. A railway viaduct sliced across the area between America Square and The Crescent. In 1884, the Metropolitan District Railway sliced diagonally through the southern half of The Crescent causing the loss of five of the eleven houses.

In the Second World War, America Square was devastated with the total loss of its original houses. In Crescent, four of the remaining six were destroyed. In Circus just one house survived the war.

After the war, the surviving house continued in commercial use.

In 1962, the Tower Hill Improvement Trust acquired the local leases which were then sold to the Greater London Council in 1975.

The GLC converted the land to open space as part of the road widening scheme at Tower Hill.