No. 20 Soho Square
This site is now occupied by a large office
building erected by Messrs. Crosse and Blackwell
in 1924–6. The first house here was erected for
Thomas Belasyse, second Viscount, and from
1689 first Earl Fauconberg, who was married to
Mary, daughter of Oliver Cromwell. Fauconberg had at first occupied a house on the north
side of the square, (ref. 99) but he lived at No. 20 from
at least 1683 until his death in 1700. (ref. 33) This
house had a frontage of sixty-four feet to the
square (ref. 21) and its irregular fenestration suggests
that it was originally built as two houses, or was
converted into one during the course of its construction.
Lord Fauconberg's widow continued to live at
No. 20 until her death in March 1712/13, (ref. 38)
when the lease passed to his nephew, Sir Thomas
Frankland, (ref. 99) to whom in July 1713 the second
Earl (later first Duke) of Portland granted a new
lease which extended Frankland's interest from
1734 to 1769. The ground rent was £32 per
annum, with an annual garden rent of thirty
shillings (i.e., three times the usual garden rent
paid for the average-sized houses in the square)
and in addition Frankland had to pay a fine of
£252. (ref. 21)
Sir Thomas Frankland did not live in the house
himself, for the ratebooks record Anthony
Duncombe as the next occupant, from 1715 to
1741. Richard Child, first Earl Tylney, was
the occupant from 1742 to 1750, (fn. a) though the
Russian minister is known to have been living in
Earl Tylney's house in 1748. (ref. 15) Arthur Onslow,
Speaker of the House of Commons, who moved
here from Leicester Street, occupied the house from
1753 to 1761. (ref. 33) In November 1756 the second
Duke of Portland granted Onslow an extension of
his leasehold interest from 1769 to 1855. Onslow lived here 'in moderate splendour', holding
his parliamentary levées, (ref. 101) and entertained there
at least once the novelist Samuel Richardson, who
according to Dr. Johnson 'used to give large vails
to the Speaker Onslow's servants, that they might
treat him with respect'. (ref. 102) In 1761 Onslow gave
up the speakership. He moved from Fauconberg
House to Great Russell Street in order, so it was
said, to be near the British Museum, of which he
was a trustee. (ref. 101)
Onslow sold the lease of the house to the fourth
Duke of Argyll, who lived here from 1762 to
1770. (ref. 33) He probably died in the house, leaving
instructions that it was to be sold for the benefit of
his younger son. (ref. 103) The purchaser, in June
1771, (ref. 104) was John Grant, son of a Scottish judge,
Patrick Lord Elchies, and himself a Baron of the
Scottish Exchequer, which office and title he
combined with the ownership of extensive sugar
plantations in Grenada. (ref. 105) It was no doubt with
the profits of the latter that he was able to absent
himself both from the rigours of Scots law and the
debilitations of the West Indian climate and to
establish himself in a large mansion in Soho
Square.
Soon after purchasing the house Grant employed a fellow Scot, Robert Adam, to embellish
the façade and to redecorate and replan the interior. A number of Adam's drawings, dated
1771 or 1772, are in Sir John Soane's
Museum, (ref. 106) but some of his proposals were never
executed. Grant evidently became concerned over
the probable expense of his architect's schemes and
endeavoured to simplify some of Adam's plans.
In March 1772 he wrote to Adam to settle the
matter of the position of the front door, then still
in the southernmost bay of the house. Writing in
the third person Grant told Adam that 'After
seeing him he canvassed and varied the Scheme he
proposed to him yesterday of changing the entry
to his house a hundred different ways, and found
them all attended with so many objections and
inconveniencies, and productive of so little advantage in proportion to the expence they would
occassion, that he has resolved to adhere precisely
to Mr Adams's original plan for beautifying the
Front, which he thinks himself obliged to communicate to Mr Adams [sic] as soon as possible
to prevent his having the trouble of making a
design for the new Porch'. (ref. 107)
Despite these economies Grant had to mortgage the house in March 1773, (ref. 108) and in 1773–4
he moved away, first to Greek Street, later to
Dean Street and finally to Grenada, where he died
in 1777. (ref. 109)
Architectural Description
The north and south prospects of Soho Square,
delineated respectively by Sutton Nicholls and an
unknown artist (Plate 68), afford trustworthy evidence bearing on the appearance of the late seventeenth-century Fauconberg House, evidence that
is confirmed and supplemented by a scale drawing
of the front prepared in connexion with the
Adam remodelling of the building in the 1770's (ref. 110)
(Plate 88a). Although basically similar to the
contemporaneous houses in the square, it was
larger than most, and slightly superior in scale and
height, sharing these attributes with its neighbours, Nos. 21 and the two houses to the south of
Sutton Row. Another feature that these houses
had in common was a pitched roof hipped at the
party walls and rising to a leaded flat, surrounded
by a balustrade.
The Adam drawing is probably an exact
delineation of the front as it existed in the early
1770's, apparently very little changed since its
original building. Three storeys high and seven
windows wide, it was simply designed and typical
of its time, being executed in brick and dressed
with stone. This was used for the long-and-short
quoins at each end of the front, for the plain
keystones of the flat gauged brick arches to the
windows, and for the storey bandcourses. A
projecting brick plinth, containing the heads of
the basement windows, extended below the
ground storey, which was about eleven feet
high. The first floor was thirteen feet nine inches
between the bandcourses, and the second floor
was eleven feet one inch in height to the eaves
cornice. The five windows to the north were
spaced with fair regularity, having piers of about
three feet between them, but the two at the south
end were more widely separated by piers over
five feet wide. The roof, pitched at about forty-five degrees, rose from a wooden eaves-cornice
having enriched bracket modillions. The five
evenly spaced dormers were originally finished
with triangular pediments, and the plain blocking
above the roof must have supported the wooden
balustrade surrounding the lead flat. The Adam
drawing shows the plain window openings furnished with exposed box-frames having slightly
cambered heads, but the sashes are omitted. The
entrance doorway at the south end of the front
was originally finished with a segmental-pedimented doorcase, but is shown here with a mid
eighteenth-century porch of Doric columns,
raised on plain pedestals and supporting entablature-blocks below an open triangular pedimenthood, the doorway being arched and furnished
with a radial fanlight.
The fashionable dress with which Adam
transformed this front was tailored with his
usual skill to disguise its age and the irregular
spacing of the windows, which obviously precluded the creation of a central feature (Plates
88b, 92). Doubtless the material he used was
the Adams' own production, Liardet's stone-paste.
He strengthened the ground storey by giving it
a rusticated face of twelve courses, with chamfered horizontal and vertical joints. The eight
piers of the two-storeyed upper face were dressed
with a giant order of pilasters, their plain shafts
rising from plain pedestals and having enriched
Ionic capitals, instead of the Corinthian originally
intended. Iron balconies of segmental plan, placed
in front of the lengthened first-floor windows,
linked the pilaster pedestals, and a guilloche band
marking the second floor extended between their
shafts. The crowning entablature was composed
of a moulded architrave, a frieze enriched with
paterae spaced at equal intervals, and a modillioned
cornice. A tall balustrade helped to conceal the
dormers and reduce the effective height of the
original roof. The entrance at the southern end
of the front was intended to have a handsome
Doric porch of three bays, the wide middle one
surmounted by a triangular pediment, but it is
fairly evident that this work was not executed.
The Adam plans of the ground and first
floors (ref. 111) (Plate 89) seem to support the suggestion,
made above, that Fauconberg House might have
been begun as two houses, the northern one considerably wider and slightly deeper than the southern. The completed building had a front range
of rooms, separated by a wall containing chimneystacks from a back range consisting of one room on
either side of the principal and secondary staircases. As arranged by Adam, the front rooms
were the entrance hall (south), the staircase
lobby (centre) and the dining-room (north). East
of the entrance hall was an oval back parlour;
the lobby opened directly to the principal staircase; and from the dining-room, doors led to the
service stair and to a dressing-room, with a
closet-wing beyond. Except for the oval parlour,
all the rooms were square or oblong in plan. On
the first floor, however, Adam indulged his
predilection for variously shaped rooms. The
large front drawing-room to the north had an
apse at each end of the three-windowed oblong
centre, and the north-east bedroom had an apsed
recess for the bed. The small front drawing-room
to the south was square, but the ante-room on its
east side was oval.
On the extensive ground at the back of the
house, Adam proposed building a two-storeyed
range of stables and coach-houses, fronting
to Sutton Place (now Falconberg Mews) and
linked to the north-east rooms of the house by
a long library on the ground floor, and a gallery above, these apartments leading to hot and
cold bathrooms in the stable range. The arcaded
inner walls of these ranges, and a matching wall of
niched arches on the south, were designed to
enclose an almost square garden, laid out with
paths framing a central circle of four segments
within four spandrels. These extensive additions
were not, however, carried out.
Volume 12 of the Adam drawings in Sir
John Soane's Museum contains eight designs,
Nos. 104–11, for the ceilings at this house, all
of them geometrical compositions in the mature
Adam manner, with grotesque and arabesque
plaster ornament framing painted medallions.
Nos. 104 and 105 are alternative designs, probably
for the dining-room, based on a large oval panel
fringed with festoons and pendants of drapery.
No. 104, which is uncoloured, shows the oval
panel containing an inner oval of husks surrounding a Maltese cross, its arms extending from a
foliated boss. In No. 105 this cross is replaced
by a quatrefoil, its lobes formed by husk-festoons.
The colours proposed for this design are light
pink and green, with strong notes of blue and
white in the painted medallions. No. 106 is a
design for the oval parlour, a delicate composition
with a concave-sided square medallion set diagonally in a larger square having rounded corners and
a wreathed medallion projecting from each side.
This ceiling has a pale green ground with white
ornament and Etruscan pink medallions. No.
107, an uncoloured design for the staircase ceiling,
shows a circular panel surrounding a central
rose, the panel frame being linked diagonally by
medallions to four quadrant motifs, all contained
within a square that is placed between two oblong
panels, each decorated with foliage scrolls flanking
a tripod urn. No. 108 (Plate 90b) is the design
executed for the ceiling of the great apse-ended
drawing-room, having the ornament contained in
a large oblong panel and two lunettes. The latter
have a fan-like arrangement of a small lunette,
modelled with a tripod between nymphs, and two
concentric bands, the inner plain and the outer
resembling a ring of niches containing urns.
Guilloche bands divide the large oblong into a
geometrical arrangement of smaller panels, three
oblongs at each end of a square. This square is
divided by the guilloche band to form four
spandrels, each ornamented with griffins flanking
a tripod urn, diagonally placed, and between the
spandrels are four tripod urns of different design,
linked by husk-festoons fringing a central medallion. The ground colours, pale green, pink and
white, are enlivened with touches of purple,
Venetian red and gold. No. 109 (Plate 90a) was
executed for the south drawing-room, a large
square panel framing segmental mouldings that
form a lunette on each side and a quadrant in
each corner. The lunettes are linked by small
medallion motifs to a circular band of anthemion,
enclosing two concentric bands, the outer having
a ring of small paterae on a plain ground, and the
inner composed of fan ornament, surrounding a
painted medallion. The lunettes and quadrants
are linked by the reversed curves formed by large
festoons of husks, and in the diagonal spaces formed
by the conjunction of the curved shapes are concave-sided oblong panels modelled with sphinxes.
The ground colours are parchment, pale green
and pink, with strong notes of pink and blue.
This ceiling, with some added painting in the
Jacobean taste, can be seen in a watercolour view
of the room by J. P. Emslie, (ref. 112) which also shows
one of the two chimneypieces for which Adam
drawings survive. (ref. 113) This chimneypiece of wood
and compo, with a moulded architrave of marble,
appears to be identical with the one designed for
'the dressing room', having short fluted pilasters
with female masks below scroll-consoles supporting frieze-blocks ornamented with paterae, and a
dentilled cornice-shelf extending above a recessed
frieze of circles containing urns and honeysuckle
flowers. The Adam design for the eating-room
chimneypiece is basically similar, but has a frieze
decoration of ewers between wreathed bacchante
masks.
Both Angelica Kauffmann and Biagio Rebecca
are said to have been employed in painting some of
the ceilings. (ref. 114) At some time before 1906 Mr.
Blackwell, whose firm then occupied Fauconberg
House, removed four painted roundels to his house
at Bushey, Hertfordshire. Photographs of these
roundels are reproduced on Plate 91.
Later History
After Grant's removal in 1774 the house stood
empty for ten years, probably because of the declining importance of Soho Square as a place of
fashionable residence. In 1784 Grant's executors
sub-let the house to John Wright, victualler, to
whom, in 1803, they sold the Duke of Portland's
lease for £3,150. (ref. 115) Fauconberg House now
became known as 'Wright's Hotel and Coffeehouse' (described in 1803 as 'A genteel house') (ref. 116)
but had degenerated by 1809, after John Wright's
day, to the 'Crown Coffee House and Tavern'. (ref. 117)
In 1810 a firm of musical-instrument makers
and music sellers (Goulding, D'Almaine, Potter
and Company, later D'Almaine and Company)
moved into the house and remained until 1857. (ref. 118)
In 1858 No. 20 Soho Square was taken over as
additional accommodation by Messrs. Crosse and
Blackwell, who already occupied the adjoining
No. 21. This firm had been founded in 1830 by
Edmund Crosse and Thomas Blackwell at No. 11
King Street (later part of the site of the Shaftesbury Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue), in premises
previously occupied for many years by Messrs.
West and Wyatt, oilmen and salters. Crosse
and Blackwell, who described themselves in the
directories as oilmen or as Italian warehousemen,
retained No. 11 King Street until 1860, but in
1838–40 they acquired other premises at No. 21
Soho Square, and in 1858 the adjoining No. 20 as
well. (ref. 118) These two houses were gradually
adapted and enlarged to meet the requirements of
the rapidly expanding business. A jam and pickle
factory occupied the back premises, with frontages to Sutton Row on the south and Falconberg
Mews on the east, while the two houses fronting
the square were used as offices and bottling rooms,
one of the principal rooms at No. 20 being the
export labelling department. At some time during
the mid-Victorian period one of the partners'
rooms was elaborately redecorated with a carved
chimneypiece of monumental proportions and a
ceiling lavishly ornamented with heraldic motifs,
including the arms of Edward the Confessor,
King John, Edward I, Mortimer, Howard,
Beaufort and Richmond. (ref. 119)
In 1924 No. 20 Soho Square was demolished
to make way for a new office block erected for
Messrs. Crosse and Blackwell by the architects
Messrs. Ernest M. Joseph (fig. 5). The new
building was probably completed and occupied
early in 1926. (ref. 120) It has eight storeys, the top
one in a mansard roof. The Portland stone front
is on a larger scale than any other in the square.
An Ionic colonnade extends across the ground and
first storeys and the sixth storey is treated as a
frieze with a large cornice above.