We emerge out of Great Portland Street station opposite the Greene Man pub. This was formerly the Farthing Pye House. It was called this as mutton pies could be bought there for a farthing.
When it was established in 1708, the area was rural and the surroundings were farm fields and pleasure gardens. In 1809, it was renamed the Green Man. The pub was later owned by Greene King who added an extra E to the name.
In 2019, the cheapest pie on the menu was ascertained to be the Woodland Mushroom & Ale which cost £10.99. As there were 960 farthings in a pound sterling, the nominal price of a pie here had risen by a factor of over 10,000.
Cleveland Street
Cleveland Street follows an old track that marked the former parish border, now the boundary between Westminster and Camden. Its oldest name, recorded by 1632, was Wrastling Lane. On John Rocque’s map, it is labelled The Green Lane and shown as broader at the north end, tapering towards the south.
The name Cleveland Street comes from one of the titles of the Fitzroy family, who began developing their Southampton estate from the 1770s onwards.
There is a view of the BT Tower (which may have changed name by the time you read this) but we are turning first right into Warren Street.
Warren Street
Warren Street was named after Anne Warren (1737–1807), the wife of Charles FitzRoy, the local landowner.
As for Anne Warren – her father had founded New York’s Greenwich Village. As a result there are other Warren Streets in North America.
Warren Street became popular place at first with artists. After the First World War, the motor trade made Warren Street (and Great Portland Street) their home for the next forty years.
Warren Mews
Conway Street
Conway Street ultimately dates from 1829 but has been known variously as Southampton Street and Hampstead Street in its history. It became one name – Conway Street – in 1938.
Francis Seymour-Conway (1718-94), 2nd Marquess of Hertford was a cousin of Charles FitzRoy, Lord Southampton. FitzRoy’s wife Isabella was a mistress of George IV, when he was the Prince of Wales.
The structure was commissioned by the General Post Office and its primary purpose was to support the microwave aerials then used to carry telecommunications traffic from London to the rest of the country. The taller structure was required to protect the radio links’ line of sight against some of the tall buildings in London then in the planning stage.
Fitzroy Square
Fitzroy Square and nearby Fitzroy Street have the family name of Charles FitzRoy, 2nd Duke of Grafton, into whose ownership the land passed because of his marriage. His descendant Charles FitzRoy, 1st Baron Southampton, developed the area during the late 18th and early 19th century.
The area ended up named after him – Fitzrovia.
The square hosts both the Croatian and Liberian embassies and was at one time home to Virginia Wolff.
Cross the square diagonally to reach the corner of Fitzroy Street,
Fitzroy Street
At its corner with Fitzroy Square is a statue of Sebastián Francisco de Miranda y Rodríguez de Espinoza (1750 – 1816), commonly known as Francisco de Miranda.
He was a Venezuelan military leader and revolutionary who fought in the American Revolutionary War, the French Revolution and the Spanish American wars of independence. He is regarded as a precursor of South America’s liberation from the Spanish Empire, and remains known as the “First Universal Venezuelan” and the “Great Universal American”.
King Charles II loaded Barbara Villiers – his mistress – with honours and rewards, including making her Duchess of Cleveland and granting her the estate of Malden in Surrey’.
As their children grew older they too were given titles and riches: at 9 years old Henry, the second son, was married to five-year-old Isabella Bennet, only child of the king’s favourite Lord Arlington, who left her a country estate at Euston in Suffolk and the large manor of Tottenham Court, extending from Tottenham Court Road to Highgate. To celebrate his marriage the little Henry was created Earl of Easton and later Duke of Grafton. He died in combat at the age of 27.
Charlotte Street
Charlotte Street, started in 1763, was named in honour of Queen Charlotte who married King George III in 1761. An18th century grid of streets was laid out in the area, distorted by the line of Rathbone Street and the north end of Newman Street.
By the end of the 19th century, the road became somewhat commercial and was the centre of the German immigrant area in Fitzrovia.
Chitty Street
Charlotte Mews
Tottenham Street
Whitfield Street
Goodge Street
Chenies 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
University College, south of Gower Place
University College, founded in 1826 and based in William Wilkins’s classical revival building of 1829, came into existence through the efforts of a group of radical early-nineteenth-century freethinkers. They included James Mill (father of the better-known philosopher John Stuart Mill), the poet Thomas Campbell and the law reformer Lord Brougham. The men decided that Regency London would benefit from a university that was non-residential and took students and appointed lecturers regardless of their religious beliefs, unlike Oxford and Cambridge, which then had an Anglicans-only policy. The new institution opened as University College in 1826 but was derided as ‘the Godless College on Gower Street’ by critics who established an Anglican rival, King’s College, on the Strand two years later. Parliament, asked to choose between the two in 1836, decided to favour neither college but to create an umbrella body, the University of London, to administer exams for both sets of students. University College was the first British university to grant degrees to women.
Jeremy Bentham
The eighteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham bequeathed a large sum of money to University College on condition that his own skeleton be preserved and displayed every year at the annual general meeting. Consequently every year the mummified Bentham is taken along to the AGM enclosed in a mahogany case with folding glass doors, seated in an armchair and holding his favourite walking stick. There have since been some cosmetic changes to the skeleton: the head is a wax model, the original being stored in the college safe, and the underclothes were changed as recently as 1935, a visiting academic insisting on it before giving a lecture. In 1975 a student kidnapped Bentham’s head and demanded £100 ransom for charity. The college paid £10 and Bentham’s head was placed at his feet. The late philosopher now resides in a prominent public position in the South Cloister and is taken to the board of governors meeting once a week where he is registered as present but not voting.