The Censuses of 1841 and 1871
The vast amount of information about the demographic
structure of the Grosvenor estate which is contained in
the enumerators' books of the decennial censuses from
1841 onwards falls largely outside the scope of this
volume, and only a brief analysis of those of 1841 and
1871 (the latter being the most recent for which the
schedules are at present open to public inspection) can
be attempted here. (ref. 32)
The results of this analysis are presented in the Table
on page 94. At the outset it must be emphasised that the
inter-censual comparisons made there should be treated
with caution because the criteria upon which the
censuses of 1841 and 1871 were taken differed in several
important respects. But despite these differences, which
are discussed below, some tentative evaluations can be
made.
Firstly, the figures show that between 1841 and 1871
the total number of residents on the estate fell by 13 per
cent. Almost all of this decline evidently occurred between
1841 and 1851, when the population of Mayfair as a whole,
and of that other fashionable area, St. James's Square,
also fell by a similar amount. (ref. 33) As will appear later, it
seems that this decline was principally amongst the residents of independent means and their servants, rather
than amongst those engaged in trade or non-domestic
service; and it may be conjectured that some, at any rate,
of this decline was due to the rival attractions of Belgravia,
Kensington and Tyburnia.
Secondly, the figures show that only a very small proportion of the residents on the estate (some 5 to 10 per
cent) belonged to the titled or leisured classes. The social
cachet of a good address there might still, in Victorian
times, be as highly prized as ever; but even in this citadel
of the beau monde such residents were far outnumbered
by the rest of the population.
The number of residents of title and leisure recorded
in the census of 1841 is, however, more than double that
recorded in the count of 1871, and this disparity requires
examination. Some decline in their numbers evidently
did take place, but it was probably not as great as the
figures suggest, and the discrepancy can be largely
explained by differences inherent in the two counts.
The first of these differences arose from the precise
dates in 1841 and 1871 when the censuses were taken.
That of 1841 was taken on 6–7 June, when Parliament
was in session and the London Season was near its height,
whereas that of 1871 was taken on 2–3 April, when both
Houses had risen for the Easter recess, and many residents of wealth and fashion were therefore absent from
their London homes: less than half the peers who are
listed in Boyle's Court Guide as having addresses within
the Grosvenor estate in Mayfair were actually resident
there on the night of the census of 1871. In 1841 some
eighty inhabited houses were not in substantially normal
occupation (i.e. were occupied only by servants or caretakers), about forty of them in the principal streets,
whereas in 1871 the number of such houses was 175,
about one hundred of them being in streets where the
titled and leisured classes generally lived. Furthermore,
in 1841 the number of such occupants who may have
been absent from their homes on the night of the census
was in part counterbalanced by others who had taken
houses for the Season, such as the Duke of Rutland, who
was living at General Thomas Grosvenor's house, No.
50 Grosvenor Square, with two members of his family
(and eleven servants).
A second important difference arises from the differing
treatment of residents of independent means, which has
resulted in a far larger number of such persons appearing
in 1841 (906) than in 1871 (300). This divergence may be
partly explained by the very catholic interpretation placed
on the term 'independent' by the enumerators in 1841.
They were instructed that 'Men, or widows, or single
women having no profession or calling, but living on their
means, may be inserted as independent', (ref. 34) but sometimes
they extended this definition to embrace almost anyone
with no occupation, including the wives and children of
tradesmen. As far as possible the latter have been excluded
in counting the number of 'independents' for the purposes
of the Table, but some exaggeration in the total number
of such persons is, nevertheless, probably inevitable. On
the other hand there are numerous instances in both the
1841 and 1871 counts in which a householder's profession
or occupation is not given, and, particularly in the latter
year, many of the persons concerned are likely to have
been untitled householders of leisure.
The Censuses of 1841 and 1871
These differences in the time of year and in the methods
of classification of the two counts point to the conclusion
that in 1841 the number of titled and leisured residents
was slightly overstated and in 1871 certainly understated.
But despite these qualifications there is little doubt that
there was indeed an overall decline between 1841 and
1871 in the number of such persons living on the estate.
In Park Street, where many 'independents' lived in 1841,
the number of residents occupying exactly the same
number of inhabited houses dropped from 932 to 786
between the two censuses, and this pattern was repeated
in other streets of 'middling' character. It is in such streets
that persons living off moderate incomes, many of them
women, would have lodged, and it may be that one of the
factors in the general decrease in the population of the
estate after 1841 was the migration of such people to
the newly developing suburbs of Paddington and
Kensington.
A similar decline in the number of M.P.'s listed in
Boyle's Court Guide with addresses on the estate from
68 in 1840 to 49 in 1872 can no doubt be attributed to the
same cause, but there was no corresponding diminution
in the number of peers, who were perhaps more reluctant
to leave such a long-established centre of fashion.
The residents who worked for financial reward comprised slightly over half the total population in both 1841
(53.99 per cent) and 1871 (56.8 per cent). (fn. a) Very few of
them were professional men, but the number of lawyers,
physicians and surgeons had increased by 1871, while the
number of army officers had fallen. 'City' men of business
and commerce—bankers, stockbrokers and merchants—
who at the turn of the century were to settle in the area
in some numbers, were still very few.
In an area such as Mayfair most of the working population were engaged in supplying the wants of the relatively
small number of wealthy residents, and by far the largest
of these wants was, of course, for service, both domestic
and out-door. In the census of 1841 grooms and coachmen (who were very numerous in this carriage-owning
area) were generally classified as servants, and altogether
servants amounted to over a third of the entire population
(34 per cent) and to 64 per cent of all the working residents.
Some 44 per cent of them were male.
By 1871 the total number of domestic servants, coachmen and grooms had fallen by nearly a quarter, but they
still amounted to 30 per cent of the entire population and
to 54 per cent of the working residents. Some 36 per cent
of them were male. The domestic servants were now
classified separately from the coachmen and grooms, and
they alone numbered 3,898, equivalent to 26.3 per cent
of the whole population and to 46.3 per cent of the
working residents. Some 26 per cent of them were male.
Between 1841 and 1871 there was thus a substantial
fall in the total number of servants, and in the proportion
of male servants.
The census of 1871 demonstrates the extent to which
the demand for domestic service was concentrated in a
comparatively few very wealthy households. Some 63 per
cent of all the households on the estate had no domestic
servant, and thirteen per cent had one each; a further
thirteen per cent had two or three servants, and only
eleven per cent (303 households) had four or more.
Expressed in a different way, some three hundred households with four or more servants employed almost 70 per
cent of all the domestics on the estate in 1871. (fn. b)
Comparable figures for 1841 cannot be calculated
because of the difficulty of identifying separate households.
About three quarters of the three hundred houses with
large domestic staffs in 1871 were in Grosvenor Square,
Park Lane, Brook Street, Grosvenor Street, Upper Brook
Street and Upper Grosvenor Street, and a similar concentration had no doubt existed in 1841. In Grosvenor
Square in 1841 over 76 per cent of the residents listed in
the census were domestic servants, (fn. c) while in 1871 (when
a greater proportion of householders and their families
were absent on the night of the census) servants accounted
for over 80 per cent of the inhabitants of the square. In
those 43 houses which were in normal occupation at the
time of the count in 1841, the average size of each household was 16.7, of whom 12.9 were servants. Twenty-six
of these 43 houses had 12 or more servants, the largest
number being at No. 44, where a staff of 23 attended to
the Earl of Harrowby and four members of his family.
In 1871 the average size of household in the 29 houses
in Grosvenor Square which were in normal occupation
had declined to 13.8, of whom 10.8 were servants. The
largest domestic establishment was at No. 41, the house
of Sir Henry Meux, baronet, of the brewing family, where
there were 21 servants. The largest complement of all, in
either census, was at Dudley House, Park Lane, in 1871,
where the Earl and Countess of Dudley, their infant son,
a nephew and two nieces, were attended by 28 domestic
servants, two coachmen and seven stable 'helpers'.
In 1841 domestic servants accounted for between 67
and 72 per cent of all the residents in Upper Brook Street,
the western part of Grosvenor Street, and Upper
Grosvenor Street. In the houses where normal occupancy
existed on the night of the census the average size of each
household was 10.9 in Upper Brook Street and 10.7 in
Upper Grosvenor Street, and the average number of
servants was 7.3. Households in the western part of
Grosvenor Street averaged 12.8, of whom 9 were servants.
In 1871 these figures had fallen only slightly, 66 per cent
of the residents in these streets still being servants, and
the average number of servants in each house being about
seven. In the western half of Brook Street some 62 per
cent of the residents were servants in both 1841 and 1871,
but their numbers in the houses in normal occupation fell
from an average of 7.0 to slightly below 5.7.
In addition to the domestic servants there were also
the coachmen and grooms, of whom there were over six
hundred living on the estate in 1871. Many of the great
houses in Grosvenor Square and the streets leading off
it had their own coach-houses and stables in the mews on
to which they backed, but in the censuses the residents
in the mews were almost always classified separately from
their employers, and the precise number of stable staff
belonging to any particular house cannot easily be found,
even in the census of 1871, and in that of 1841 never: the
previously mentioned case of Dudley House provides
a rare exception, and the Marquess of Westminster's
stables are known to have been near Grosvenor House in
Reeves Mews, where in 1871 lived the head coachman and
his family, an assistant coachman, a groom and two
servants. The census of 1871 shows that in the yards and
mews behind the principal streets, in such places as
Adams Mews (now Row), Blackburne's Mews, Three
Kings Yard and Wood's Mews, almost all the male working residents by then in fact worked with horses, the
public-house keepers, of whom there were often one in
each mews, being the most notable exceptions. A few
farriers, jobmasters, ostlers, carmen, coachsmiths and
such like could be found there, but by far the most
numerous occupations were those of coachman and
groom. In Three Kings Yard, for instance, ten of the
twelve householders were coachmen or grooms, the
other two being a female domestic servant and the keeper
of the public house at the corner of Davies Street. The
latter and one footman were the only men not working
in the stables. The entire population of this busy little
working community lurking inconspicuously behind the
fashionable mansions of Brook Street, Grosvenor Street
and Grosvenor Square upon which it was so totally
dependent and yet from which it was socially so totally
divided, amounted to sixty-five persons.
Apart from demand for personal service, both indoors
and outdoors, wealthy residents' other great want,
sufficiently extensive to reflect itself in the general pattern
of employment on the estate, was in the field of dress and
fashion. But while demand for domestic service declined
between 1841 and 1871, demand for services providing
for personal adornment was increasing. The Table above
shows that whereas in 1841 1,060 residents had work
dependent on dress and fashion, a figure equivalent to
11.5 per cent of the working population of the estate, by
1871 the corresponding figures were 1,348 residents,
amounting to 16 per cent of the working population.
During this period the number of dressmakers rose from
310 to 507, and of tailors from 205 to 269, but laundresses
remained constant at 116 and 113. The remainder
included such trades as milliner, draper, hosier, hatter,
haberdasher, bootmaker, dyer, waistcoat-maker, hairdresser, lace merchant and lace cleaner. Apart from
domestic service these trades provided in toto by far the
largest source of local employment for women.
Unlike many of the servants, coachmen and grooms,
the residents engaged in these trades were scattered over
many parts of the estate, with particular concentrations
in the poorer areas immediately to the south of Oxford
Street and in what are now Grosvenor Hill and Bourdon
Street. Many of the women were the wives or daughters
of householders engaged in quite different trades, and
the needlewomen and laundresses in particular probably
often worked at home, the sooty grime of London and
the absence as yet of a constant water supply providing
the latter with continuous and arduous work. There were,
however, half a dozen employers of large, generally resident, staffs of needlewomen or shop assistants. In 1871
three of these—a dressmaker (whose staff of eleven lived
elsewhere), a lace merchant and a linen-draper—were in
South Audley Street, and there was one each in Mount
Street (court dressmaker) and the eastern parts of Brook
Street (milliner) and Grosvenor Street (silk mercer). The
biggest of these establishments was that of Smith,
Durrant, Mayhew and Loder, at Nos. 58–60 (consec.)
South Audley Street, where Francis Loder, living in
1871 with his wife and two infant sons, employed a male
staff of six assistants, four porters, two clerks and two
apprentices, and a female staff of sixteen assistants, plus
a female domestic staff of seven—all living in.
The demands of wealthy residents on the estate may
also have been at least partly responsible for the number
of local workers engaged in the coachbuilding trades.
This demand was of course very small in comparison
with those for personal service and the dress trades, the
total number of workers in the trades of coachbuilder,
painter, trimmer, smith, plater and springmaker being
only 74 in 1841 and 81 in 1871. A large proportion of them
lived in the area immediately south of Oxford Street,
where they had been established for many years. This
concentration may well, indeed, have originated in the
low rents charged here at the time of the original development of the estate, for coachbuilding always required a
considerable amount of space; but the close proximity
of numerous wealthy customers was no doubt also an
advantage, just as it is to-day for the motor-car dealers of
Berkeley Square and Berkeley Street.
Few of the numerous other trades practised on the
estate appear to have been notably directed towards the
requirements of the rich residents upon which the occupations so far discussed did chiefly depend. Some of the
firms (mainly shops) in which the 521 residents engaged
in 1871 in the food and drink trades worked no doubt
catered for expensive local tastes, and the poulterer John
Baily, who employed sixteen men at his shop in Mount
Street, was in later years known to the Duke of Westminster himself. But the relatively even distribution of
the food and drink trade workers throughout all but the
most exclusive residential parts of the estate suggests that
most business was of a very local nature. In the High
Victorian world of 1871 the 56 publicans living on the
estate, at all events, are not likely to have been greatly
dependent upon the custom of upper-class residents.
Some of the 73 lodging-house keepers may, on the other
hand, to judge from their numbers in such partly fashionable streets as Green Street, Park Street and Mount Street,
have found much of their custom amongst persons of
rank who had no town house of their own. It is a testimony
to the accuracy of Anthony Trollope's observation that
when, in Framley Parsonage, Archdeacon Grantly and
his wife had occasion to come up to London they took
lodgings in Mount Street, which in fact contained in 1871
the highest number of lodging houses of any street on the
Grosvenor estate.
Although over half of all the residents on the estate
worked in trade or service, there can have been little outward reflection of this in the streets, which were, of course,
overwhelmingly residential in character except in such
'shopping' streets as Mount Street and Oxford Street.
Dress and fashion, and domestic service, the two principal
sources of employment in the area, were unobtrusive
trades, and the noise made by the 'machinists' who are
occasionally recorded in the census cannot have been so
generally heard as in the industrialised quarters of London. Conditions in the two primarily labouring-class
areas, immediately south of Oxford Street and in the
south-eastern corner of the estate, must certainly have
provided a striking contrast with those of the neighbouring Brook Street and Grosvenor Street, but even there
the smell of horses must have been far more notable than
the clatter of machinery.
The census of 1871 presents a detailed picture of the
social composition of the estate as it existed about a decade
before the commencement of widespread rebuilding in
the early 1880's under the first Duke of Westminster's
superintendence. This picture was made about a century
after the completion of the original building development, and it shows very clearly how relatively little change
had taken place during that period.
Aristocrats and gentlemen still lived mainly in
Grosvenor Square and the four streets extending east
and west from it. Norfolk (now Dunraven) Street, and
the south ends of Park Street and South Audley Street
were still fashionable, and Park Lane had come into its
own in the early nineteenth century. Nor does the basic
pattern of the seasonal movements of the fashionable
world seem to have changed greatly since the mid
eighteenth century, although November and December
had probably become quieter because Parliament now
seldom sat in those months.
The public houses in Upper Grosvenor Street and
Upper Brook Street no longer existed, but such fashionable streets had become popular with physicians, of whom
in 1871 there were three in the former and six in the latter.
Rich businessmen were also beginning to appear in small
numbers in the best streets—Joseph Baxendale, for
instance, the senior partner in the firm of Pickford and
Company, the carriers, which had some two thousand
employees, lived at No. 78 Brook Street; and in addition
to Sir Henry Meux in Grosvenor Square itself there were
at least four brewers, those three of them (Sir Thomas
Buxton, Sir Dudley Marjoribanks and Octavius Coope)
who lived in Upper Brook Street each having a retinue
of servants ranging between twelve and nineteen in
number.
In both Grosvenor Street and Brook Street the number
of tradesmen had declined since 1790, and members of
the medical profession had settled there in large numbers.
In Grosvenor Street in 1871 18 houses were occupied by
physicians and surgeons and another five by four dentists
and an oculist—equivalent to 31 per cent of all the houses
in the street within the estate; and in Brook Street there
were also 18 houses similarly occupied, plus another two
by dentists, making 44 per cent of all the houses there
within the estate. Another five houses in Brook Street
were now occupied by two private hotels, Lillyman's at
No. 43 and Claridge's at Nos. 49–55 (odd). Both these
establishments had originated in the early nineteenth
century, the former as Kirkham's, the latter as Wake's
and Mivart's, and both belonged to that select class of
hotel where 'no guests were received who were not known
to the landlord either personally or through fit credentials
. . .An unknown and unaccredited stranger could, by the
mere chance latch-key of wealth, no more obtain access
to such hotels as these than he could make himself to-day
[1920] a member of some exclusive club by placing the
amount of the entrance fee in the hands of the hall
porter.' (ref. 35) At Claridge's, on the night of the census in
1871, the thirty-nine visitors were attended by sixty-six
living-in servants—a number that probably included both
personal domestics and the hotel staff.
In Mount Street, despite the presence of one peer, two
M.P.'s and two foreign nobles, the commercial element
of the population may have increased slightly since the
mid eighteenth century, some 75 per cent of the householders being engaged in trade or domestic service. In
North Audley Street, too, there seems to have been a
small increase, for here all but four of the householders
in 1871 were in trade, the exceptions being two widows,
a surgeon and a schoolmistress; but in South Audley
Street no perceptible change had taken place, some 65 per
cent of the householders being tradesmen, and most of
the 'independents' being still at the south end. Most of the
tradesmen in these streets kept few domestic servants, the
average number in the commercial households of North
Audley Street, for instance, being only slightly over
one each. In Mount Street, it may be noted, the residence
of several butlers (described as head of household) with
their families shows that at any rate senior domestics did
not always live at their place of employment; but elsewhere on the estate (in Davies Street and Binney Street)
there are instances of households consisting of butlers'
wives and children without a husband or father, who was
presumably 'living in' at his employer's house.
The parts of the estate on which substantial social
change first took place were in the poorer areas occupied
by the labouring classes. The two main such areas were
immediately south of Oxford Street chiefly east of North
Audley Street, and in the south-eastern extremity of the
estate in the mews now known as Grosvenor Hill, Bourdon
Street and Place, Broadbent Street and Jones Street.
Both these areas had been relatively poorly occupied since
the time of the original building development, and both
were greatly altered in the second half of the nineteenth
century by the building of blocks of model lodging houses.
But whereas in the area immediately south of Oxford
Street the first such block (Clarendon Buildings in
Balderton Street) was still in course of erection at the
time of the census of 1871 and had not yet been occupied,
in the south-eastern corner of the estate several blocks
had already been completed; and the effect of this innovation can therefore be compared, at any rate for the years
between 1841 and 1871.
The two censuses show that in the twenty-nine fourstorey houses with basements in Robert Street (now
Weighhouse Street), parallel with Oxford Street, there
was no significant change in the total numbers of residents.
In 1841 there were 526 and in 1871, 512, the latter figure
being about ten per cent more than the population of the
whole of Grosvenor Square. The average number of residents per house was thus 18.1 and 17.65 respectively.
Many of the inhabitants were coachmen, tailors, porters,
labourers, building tradesmen, needlewomen and charwomen. In 1871 each of the twenty-nine houses in this
street contained an average of 4.9 separate households;
and the average number of residents in each household
was 3.6 (compared with 13.8 for the houses in Grosvenor
Square in normal occupation on the night of the census).
Comparable figures for households in 1841 are not
available.
But in the south-eastern mews area the building of
several blocks of model lodging houses in the 1850's and
1860's greatly increased the overall population of this little
working-class territory. In 1841 there were 805 residents
in the 76 dwellings there, and in 1871 857 in 81 dwellings,
the average number per dwelling remaining constant
at 10.6. But by 1871 the new model lodging houses contained 287 extra residents; the total population of this
densely packed little enclave, only some two and a half
acres in extent, was thus 1,144, equivalent to nearly eight
per cent of the population of the entire hundred-acre
estate.
Despite such wide variety of social circumstances,
Grosvenor Square and the principal streets had to a
notable extent retained for over a century the original
social cachet of their first development. This was not
always the case in originally fashionable areas. Covent
Garden Piazza, built in the 1630's to attract 'Persons of
the greatest Distinction' had lost much of its social
prestige within two generations, the growth of the
adjacent market being partly responsible. (ref. 36) Its later
seventeenth-century successors, Golden Square, containing 'such houses as might accommodate Gentry',
Soho Square, said in 1720 to be 'well inhabited by Nobility
and Gentry', and Leicester Square, had all suffered a considerable social decline within two or at most three
generations. (ref. 37) On the Earl of Burlington's estate (Cork
Street and Savile Row area), where building had begun
at about the same time as on the Grosvenor estate, the
process took a little longer, but substantial change had
nevertheless taken place by 1850. (ref. 38) On the other hand,
Berkeley Square, Cavendish Square, Portman Square
and above all St. James's Square (built as long ago as the
1660's and 70's) had retained their original social character
largely unchanged. These varying fortunes suggest that
favourable topographical situation and the absence of
adverse social influences from surrounding areas were
of more importance in preserving the original social
quality of an estate than either the terms of land tenure at
the time of first building or the watchful management
of a ground landlord intent on maintaining the value of
his property.