The Euston Road was built in 1756 as the New Road, London’s first by-pass, to aid the manoeuvring of troops and enable drovers to take their cattle to Smithfield market without having to use Oxford Street and Holborn, Euston Road later became the setting for three of London’s great rail termini – Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross – and has since been widened and upgraded into one of London’s major traffic routes. The northern side has been continually redeveloped and is now dominated by large granite and glass office blocks, while on the southern side are the offices of a number of major organizations, including the Wellcome Trust, the Society of Friends and Camden Council.
north side: Albany Street to York Way
Euston Tower
Along with Centre Point and Telecom Tower, Euston Tower was built in the 1950s at a time of intense government paranoia, as one of a number of hi-tech skyscraper office blocks equipped to shelter leading civil servants and other government personnel in the event of atomic war. Below the blocks a network of bunkers was ready to be manned by officials if military tension increased. But the system was soon obsolete technologically and Euston Tower became simply another London office block, albeit one in which MI5, until recently, housed its telephone network, on the seventeenth floor.
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital (1866–1980s), No. 144
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who founded the hospital as a dispensary for women and children, was England’s first female doctor and the only woman on the British Medical Council from 1873 to 1892. The hospital was saved from closure after a campaign in the 1980s and moved to Huntley Street, Bloomsbury. The Euston Road site is currently being refurbished.
south side: Birkenhead Street to Bolsover Street
Wellcome Building, Euston Road at Gordon Street, west side
Built in 1931–2 by Septimus Warwick in the classical revival style for the laboratories of Sir Henry Wellcome, the scientist who photographed archaeological sites during the First World War, it is now the headquarters of the Wellcome Trust.
MI5 headquarters (1970-94), No. 140 Gower Street
MI5, the semi-secret government department responsible for combating terrorism and subversion, was based in a drab 1950s block at the corner of Gower Street and Euston Road, known to those who worked in it as ‘Russia House’, until 1994. By then the organization had been run for three years by Stella Rimington, MI5’s first woman Director General, following an unprecedented public announcement, part of prime minister John Major’s policy of limited openness regarding the security services, something which had been unthinkable during the Cold War. The block was demolished at the end of the decade to be rebuilt by Michael Hopkins as the Wellcome Trust’s new headquarters.
Gower Street – suggestions from the Ed Glinnet book
One of Bloomsbury’s most prominent streets – past residents include Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin, though the houses of both have since been demolished – Gower Street was named after Lady Gertrude Leveson-Gower, wife of the 4th Duke of Bedford, who in 1790 was in charge of building its first houses. The street was described by the mid-nineteenth-century arch critic John Ruskin as the ‘ne plus ultra of ugliness in street architecture’, a description that now seems unfair. The first ever exhibition of a railway engine took place on a patch of waste ground at the northern end of Gower Street in 1802, when a steam-powered locomotive pulled a carriage on a small circular track enclosed by a high fence. The exhibition was organized by the mining engineer Richard Trevithick, who developed his high-pressure steam engine ten years before George Stephenson. After leaving for South America, Trevithick lost out to the latter in the race to develop a workable railway system and returned to Britain penniless in 1827. Gower Street is now dominated by university buildings and small hotels.
west side: Bedford Square to Euston Road
Birthplace of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, No. 7
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Britain’s best-known art movement, was founded at 7 Gower Street in 1848 by the painters Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Reacting against the reactionary nature of Joshua Reynolds and the Royal Academy, they wanted to create a body of work similar in brightness of colour, attention to detail and honest simplicity to the period of Italian painting prior to Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520). Rossetti wanted the group’s name to include the then fashionable term ‘Early Christian’, but when Hunt objected and proposed ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ Rossetti added the word ‘Brotherhood’, as he wanted the society to be secret, in line with the Italian political group the Carbonaris in that year of revolution across Europe. In the summer of 1849 the artists staged their first exhibition, in which Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin was signed ‘PRB’ to maintain the society’s air of mystery. Despite their unmatched body of work, the Brotherhood fell gradually apart once Holman Hunt left for Palestine.
Frank Dutton Jackson’s ‘Temple of the Occult’, No. 99
Frank Dutton Jackson, a fake cleric, and his wife, Editha, set up a Temple of the Occult at No. 99 in the early years of the twentieth century. Here Jackson, or Theo Horos as he preferred to be called, debauched hundreds of young girls in mock religious ceremonies amid incense smoke and under subdued lights. He told one girl, Daisy Adams, that he was Jesus Christ and that she would give birth to a divine child. He and his wife were eventually prosecuted and tried at the Old Bailey where, despite Jackson’s plea, ‘Did Solomon not have 300 legal wives and 600 others?’, he was convicted of raping and procuring girls for immoral purposes. The Spectator magazine occupied the building from the 1920s to 1975, and No. 99 now belongs to the Catholic chaplaincy.
east side: Euston Road to Montague Place