No. 3
Architects, Messrs. A. and D. Ospalek, 1933–4
The site of this house, having a frontage of fifty
feet to the square, was conveyed, together with a
detached piece of ground in Babmays Mews (now
Babmaes Street), by the Earl of St. Albans and his
surviving trustee, Baptist May, on 13–14 January
1673/4 to Edward Shaw of St. Paul's, Covent
Garden, gentleman, and his trustees, Sir Theodore Deveaux and Robert Grayden, gentleman,
both also of that parish. (fn. a) The freehold was conveyed but a perpetual ground-rent of £23 4s. 4d.
was reserved. (ref. 47)
The early history of the house built on this site
is derived from a Chancery petition of Shaw and
his trustees. (ref. 48) By August 1675 Shaw had almost
completed a brick house. On the 21st of that
month the anti-Court politician, William, Lord
Cavendish, son of the third Earl of Devonshire
and himself later first Duke of Devonshire, agreed,
according to Shaw, to buy the house for £3800.
The conveyance (of the freehold by Shaw's
trustees, and of certain leasehold terms by Shaw
himself) was to be made to Lord Cavendish's
trustees by 29 November, on the previous payment of £1300. The remaining £2500 and interest was to be paid in stated instalments, and to
secure the payment of this outstanding sum Lord
Cavendish was said to have undertaken that his
trustees would re-convey the premises in mortgage. Shaw in turn undertook to finish the house.
Some final carving, painting and oak wainscoting
was to be executed, the outbuildings completed,
the stable and back yard paved with Dutch bricks
and the kitchen paved with Purbeck stone. The
plan of the house is not clearly apparent from the
specification of uncompleted work, but mention is
made of the garret storey and of eight rooms in the
storey below it. The internal divisions below this
level included a dining-room, a drawing-room, a
great and lesser bedchamber each with a dressingor withdrawing-room, the great and lesser staircases, two great parlours, a 'drawing roome next
the garden', three other rooms on the same floor as
this last drawing-room, the 'entring roomes' and
the 'lowermost roomes'.
The dealings of builder and owner led to dispute
here, as at the adjacent house of Lord Ossulston.
This arose over the completion of the conveyance from Shaw to Lord Cavendish. According
to Shaw articles of agreement had been drawn up
which erroneously provided for the conveyance
to be made to Lord Cavendish instead of to
trustees for him, and for the securing of the outstanding purchase money by bond instead of by
mortgage. Lord Cavendish was said by Shaw to
have agreed to observe the original conditions but
subsequently to have refused to sign the conveyance, occasioning a petition to Chancery in May
1676 by Shaw, who claimed to have been thus
prevented from disposing of the property. (ref. 48)
The dispute was evidently quickly settled and
Lord Cavendish appears to have arranged for the
conveyance to be made to his father, the Earl of
Devonshire. On 31 July and 1 August Shaw and
his trustees conveyed his freehold and leasehold to
trustees for the Earl of Devonshire, in consideration of £3600. (ref. 49) On the following two days the
Earl's trustees made the mortgage to Shaw's
trustees to secure the outstanding £2500. (ref. 50) The
final discharge of the mortgage was acknowledged
by deeds of 7–8 March 1678/9, which also
recorded the surrender of Lord Cavendish's
interest in the premises by right of the 'treaty or
contract' with Shaw which 'did not proceed'. (ref. 51)
The memorandum in the rent-roll of 1676
against Shaw's name that the possessor was 'now my
Lord Cavendish' probably originates from the time
when the agreement was in force. (ref. 52) In the 1677
ratebook Shaw appears as occupier. It is, however,
Lord Cavendish, not the Earl of Devonshire, who
is indicated as occupier in ratebooks from 1679. (fn. b)
It is clear that after 1684 when Lord Cavendish succeeded to the Earldom of Devonshire he
did not regularly occupy the house, although there
is no positive evidence that, as Dasent suggests, (ref. 54)
the house was, like Lord Ossulston's, let to foreign
ambassadors. The Earl's building enterprises at
Chatsworth and his engagements overseas with
William III probably left the house often unoccupied by him. From 1685 to 1696 the Earl of
Ossory, the Count Du Roy, the Duchess of Grafton, the Earl of Bridgwater, the Duke of Shrewsbury and the Earl of Carlisle appear successively as
occupants. (fn. c) From 1698 to 1707 the rates were
paid sometimes by the Duke of Devonshire and
sometimes by the Hanoverian envoy, Baron
Schutz, who probably occupied the house throughout, and presumably continued to do so until
1710, as Dasent indicates on the evidence of ratebooks no longer surviving. (ref. 54)
In July 1710 the second Duke of Devonshire
sold the house for £3700 (including £1000 to pay
off a mortgage interest held by the Countess of
Essex) to John, third Baron (and later first Earl of)
Ashburnham. (ref. 56) Lord Ashburnham's important
ownership of this site is not noted by Dasent,
as the series of ratebooks is defective for this
period.
At about the time of this sale the house, or part
of it, collapsed, and some of the first work on the
house recorded in the account books of Lord
Ashburnham's steward, in November 1710, was
the provision of timber shoring, the surveying of
the damage, and subsequent repairs, not very
extensive in scale, by two joiners in partnership,
Joseph Duxon and Edward Johnson. (ref. 57) Lord
Ossulston's carpenter, Jeremiah Delavall, was
paid a small sum in connexion with this work, and
the collapse was probably associated in some manner which cannot now be determined with the
work Delavall was then carrying out on Lord
Ossulston's property and the damage Mr. Brerewood claimed to have suffered at the same time
(see page 79).
In November 1711 Richard Saunders, a carver,
was paid £50 for work on the house. It is not clear
whether Lord Ashburnham occupied the house
regularly. He seems to have paid a caretaker, but
on at least one occasion made use of the house
when in January 1712 he, like other grandees
living in the square, entertained Prince Eugene at
his house. (ref. 57)
In 1712 Lord Ashburnham began to rebuild
the house. The architect is not definitely known,
but the new house can certainly be associated with
Hawksmoor. When the adjacent house, No. 4,
was burnt down in December 1725 Sir John
Vanbrugh commented to Lord Carlisle that No. 3,
then occupied by Lord Palmerston, 'did not
receive one Shillings damage, nor was it found
necessary So much as to remove any goods. This
is owing to the advice Mr. Hawksmoor & I gave
my Lord Ashburnham at the Building of it.' (ref. 58)
That Hawksmoor's advice was sought is confirmed by Lord Ashburnham's account books
which record that in May 1712 his steward
accompanied 'Mr Hawksmore' to the square, and
a few days later went with him to Lord Ashburnham's lawyer. A public advertisement by the
Sun Fire Office after the 1725 fire at No. 4 also
drew attention to the preservation of No. 3 and
attributed this to Hawksmoor. It pointed to the
similar preservation of Mr. Child's house in Lincoln's Inn Fields (fn. d) and of houses in Spring Garden
next to the French chapel, (fn. e) and went on to say
that 'the Houses in the three above-mention'd
Places, which so well resisted the Fire, were
directed by Mr. Hawksmoor, who in all his
publick as well as private Buildings, has always
had a particular Regard to fence against that
terrible Calamity'. (ref. 61)
The names of various workmen appear in Lord
Ashburnham's accounts. (fn. f) The period of the work
is not easy to determine as some of the debts to
workmen seem to have been contracted retrospectively, but most of the work was probably done
between July 1712 and the autumn of 1714, with
the carpenter's activity (perhaps not all on the
house) continuing into 1716. By August 1713
the carcase was sufficiently advanced for Lord
Ashburnham to insure it for £1000 and the back
premises for £500. (ref. 63) In September 1714 a lease
of the adjacent house could refer to Lord Ashburnham's house as 'new built'. (ref. 10)
Some of the payments made at this time may
possibly have been for other property of Lord
Ashburnham, but probably much the greater part
if not all of the building operations at this time
were in the square. The accounts include some
£3100 spent on building, to which may probably
be added some £923 owed to plasterer and painter.
Lord Ashburnham paid separately for at least
some of the material used. Between August 1712
and August 1714 he paid £430 to two brickmakers, John Bowtell and James Barrett, £68 8s.
to a timber merchant and £29 for lead.
In November 1712 Mrs. Tijou was paid £109
'in full of my Lord's Note for the Iron Balosters
and Railes for the staire case made by her Husband'. It is uncertain whether this was for the
house in the square, or, as is more probable, a final
payment for work carried out by Jean Tijou for
Lord Ashburnham's father, the first Baron, at
Ampthill in 1706–7. (ref. 64)
The front of the rebuilt house is prominent
among the houses of the square in Kip's panoramic
view of c. 1714–22 (Plate 4, fig. 6), by reason of
its being bounded with pilasters and carried up
with an attic storey, breaking the continuity of
the eaves-cornice and dormered roof common
to the adjacent houses in the square, which do
not have their party-walls expressed externally.
If Kip's evidence is to be trusted, the front was
a design with affinities to Hawksmoor's simpler
domestic style, containing a central doorway
dressed with a pediment, and four tiers of five
windows. All have plain segmental-arched
openings, but those in the first two storeys
have sills projecting on consoles, and those in the
third storey have panelled aprons. The attic is
shown underlined by a stringcourse, stopped
against the pilasters, and is finished with a cornice
and parapet breaking round the pilasters. Bowles's
view published in c. 1752, however, shows the
front with its main cornice below the attic storey,
breaking round the pilasters and more or less level
with that of No. 4 (Plate 130).
Figure 6:
No. 3 St. James's Square. Re-drawn from Kip's
(c. 1714–22) and Sutton Nicholls's (c. 1722) views
Lord Ashburnham did not occupy the house
for any length of time. In 1716 it was inhabited
by Edward Harley, later second Earl of Oxford,
the collector. In 1717 the house was taken over
by Henry Temple, who in 1723 became first
Viscount Palmerston. He apparently owned the
freehold by May 1730 when the ground-rent was
conveyed to him (thus extinguishing it) by
representatives of the Jermyn family, (ref. 65) but it is
not known when he bought it from Lord Ashburnham. Lord Palmerston remained here until
his death in 1757, when he was succeeded in the
house by the second Viscount until 1759 and by
Lady Palmerston until 1762. (ref. 6)
From 1762 to 1799 the house was occupied by
the fifth Earl and first Marquis of Donegall, who
bought it from Lord Palmerston in May 1770 for
£12,000. (ref. 66) The house was perhaps altered
during Lord Donegall's ownership of it, but there
is no documentary evidence of this: the house was
unoccupied in 1772. (ref. 6) If an alteration was made
in that year it may have been carried out by
'Capability' Brown, who was then building Lord
Donegall's country house, Fisherwick Park.
On the Marquis's death in 1799 the house descended to his younger son, Lord Spencer
Chichester. He evidently determined to dispose of
it. In July 1800 the house was surveyed by John
Soane, on behalf of Philip, the third Earl of Hardwicke, for whose father he had worked at Wimpole in 1791–3. A plan was made and Soane
reported that the premises were extensive and substantial, with 'very large and low' back rooms. He
suggested that the 'common staircase', being 'steep
and confined', should be altered, and that, as there
was room for further building, dressing-rooms
should be added to the library and to the chamber
over it. He thought the house worth £11,500 as it
stood, though a purchaser might have to go to
£12,500, and that needful repairs and additions
would cost a further £3500. (ref. 67) From 1801 the
Earl of Hardwicke appears as ratepayer for No. 3
but his purchase of the house was delayed, perhaps
by his appointment in March 1801 as Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland, until February 1805. The
purchase was in the end made for only £10,500. (ref. 66)
In June 1815 Soane again viewed the premises
and plans were made, apparently for alterations to
the offices, but nothing was done at this time. (ref. 68)
The additional buildings were finally erected to
Soane's design between October 1818 and May
1819, but apparently on a less extensive scale
than those originally proposed, at a cost of
£2062 18s. 1d. (ref. 69) Soane seems to have excogitated
his main plans in two weekends overshadowed by
an oppression of spirits, induced by the recollection of his wife's death in the month of 'black
November' three years before. The plans were
finally settled on 4 November. (ref. 70) By December
the new buildings were roofed, (ref. 71) and in February
Soane was settling plasterwork details. (ref. 70) Soane
showed Lord and Lady Hardwicke over the house
in March, when they were 'greatly pleased' with
what he had done. (ref. 70) In April he took views of two
of the new rooms to Lord Hardwicke (ref. 72) and in
June the completed work was measured for the
making out of Soane's account. (ref. 73)
In August Lord Hardwicke agreed conditionally to the performance of further work on the
kitchen passage and back court. (ref. 74) In October he
was still intending to have the work done, although
he expressed to Soane polite dismay at the amount
by which the bills exceeded the £1200 which he
had hoped would cover the cost: 'it only proves the
heavy expense of executing any plan of building
even upon a contracted scale; for I have no doubt
you have endeavoured to keep the expense within
bounds, and for this I must of course rely entirely
upon you'. (ref. 75) No further work is, however,
recorded among Soane's papers. The account was
finally discharged in January 1829. (ref. 69)
(fn. g)
Work had been carried out on the staircase,
Lord Hardwicke's old study, the basement and
storeroom, and the extension of the back to include
a new dressing-room and study for Lord Hardwicke, a dressing-room for Lady Hardwicke and
a maid's room. The party-wall between the back
premises of Nos. 3 and 4 was lowered, with Lady
de Grey's consent, to give more light to the
library, the excellence of whose contents drew a
subacid comment from William Cobbett. (ref. 77)
No contemporary plans or drawings of the work
are known. Lady Hardwicke's dressing-room had
a lantern and a domical ceiling, evidently in a
slated domical roof. (ref. 78) The windows of Lord
Hardwicke's study were 'splayed'. (ref. 71) The work
also included a 'waggon headed ceiling' and '3
Large Venetian Sash frames'. (ref. 79) Beyond Soane's
own records, there is no contemporary evidence of
the character of his work, although plans and
elevations dating from the early twentieth century (ref. 80) suggest that he did not alter the façade to
the square.
The house remained in private occupation until
1852. Then, after a year as a club-house, it
became the office of the Copyhold, Inclosure and
Tithe Commission, later the Board and Ministry
of Agriculture, until 1922. (ref. 81) But it was probably
in substance the house as altered in 1820 that was
demolished in 1930. (ref. 82)
The fabric was not inspected before its demolition, but some evidence of the building survives in
survey drawings of the basement, ground-, firstand second-floor plans (fig. 7), in a cross-section
and in a crudely drawn front elevation.
The basement was divided into two equal parts
by a transverse corridor, each part consisting
essentially of three rooms or compartments. The
front and middle compartments were square and
equally large, and they were ceiled with groined
vaults rising from arches against the walls and
from a central pier in each compartment. The
back rooms, however, were not vaulted and this
suggests that they may have been added to the
original basement which was, no doubt, that of the
1712–14 house and indicated its original plan and
extent.
Figure 7:
No. 3 St. James's Square, plans. Re-drawn from survey in London County Council collection
Each storey of the reconstructed or partially rebuilt house had two rooms in front, divided by a
massive cross-wall from the deep back part which
had one large room on the north of the principal
stairs, rising round the curved face of a D-shaped
wall, the service stairs, and a lobby which gave
access to the south-east wing. This wing probably
consisted of one room before it was lengthened by
Soane and the original ground-floor wing room,
with splayed window-reveals, was probably Lord
Hardwicke's new library.
The drawing of the front elevation shows a
composition four storeys high and five windows
wide that in its scale and disposition of parts could
well have dated from the 1770's, and the details,
though crudely implied, could be matched in work
of that period, but the basement, with a roundarched door between two pairs of segmentalarched windows, suggests the 1712–14 building.
The ground-storey windows, three to the left and
one to the right of the doorway, were framed with
moulded architraves, rising from a sill-band and
finished each with a cornice. The principalstorey windows were underlined with a plain
pedestal, its die of brickwork, and each was
dressed with a moulded architrave, a frieze decorated with fluting between paterae, and a cornice
with triangular pediments above the middle and
each end window. The chamber-storey windows,
and those of the attic, were completely framed
with moulded architraves, and there were cornices
above and below the attic.
In July 1929 application was made to rebuild
the property as a bank on the ground and first
floors with flats above, to a height of 104 feet
6 inches. Consent was given by the London
County Council (ref. 83) but the scheme was abandoned
and the site remained vacant for three years. In
the course of 1932 applications were made for the
erection of an office block to a height of some
100 feet. Permission to build higher than the
limit of 80 feet imposed by the London Building
Act of 1930 was granted in January 1933, Partly
because the building faced on to an 'open space'.
Appeals from neighbouring owners against the
height of the building were subsequently withdrawn. (ref. 83) In February 1933 The Times reported
that the executors of the late Sir Frederick Hall,
M.P., had agreed to grant a building lease of the
site for the erection of 'a stately block of offices'. (ref. 84)
In September it noted, under the heading 'New
Houses in St. James's Square, Lack of Unity',
that building was proceeding: it regretted that
'separate ownerships and rebuilding on sites that
have to be dealt with one by one as soon as they
change hands, are resulting in a conglomeration of
types that will, at the best, leave the square to be
regarded as an example of redevelopment without
the guidance of a master-mind'. (ref. 85) By the end of
1934 the building was completed and was formally
opened on 5 December with a luncheon at No. 3
under Lord Astor's presidency.
The architects were Messrs. Alfred and David
Ospalek, and the stone panels representing London
street-criers were carved by Mr. Newbury Trent.
The Times commented: 'the interest of the
property today is not its record as the home of
notable personages, but as an acceptable example
of modern design of offices, meeting the requirements of amenity, while introducing a new type
of structure into a historic spot where many fine
old houses survive. It is an instructive achievement in putting on a costly site such premises as
promise to remunerate the promoters of the
scheme.' (ref. 86)