CHAPTER II
Grosvenor Street
Grosvenor Street was one of the earliest streets to be laid
out as part of the Grosvenor family's development of their
Mayfair lands. The very first building agreement,
concluded with the estate surveyor, Thomas Barlow, in
August 1720, was for a large parcel of land which included
the south-side frontage of the new street between Davies
Street and the estate boundary. The rest of the street was
built under a number of agreements made between 1720 and
1725, some of them covering only single house plots. The
leasehold terms offered to builders varied from one part of
the street to another. On the north side to the east of Davies
Street the term was eighty years with the one notable
exception of No. 16, where the building lease was for
ninety-nine years. (ref. 1) Barlow was granted one lease of the
south side between Davies Street and the estate boundary
for ninety-nine years, but his sub-leases to other builders
of the individual house plots here were usually for eighty
years. Between Davies Street and Grosvenor Square,
however, on both sides of the street the leases were
invariably for ninety-nine years and it was here that in
general the grander houses were erected.
By 1729 most of the houses in the street had been built
and occupied, the only exceptions being a group of four on
the north side to the west of No. 36 (all now demolished),
which were not completed until 1733–4, and the tiny onebay house at No. 81, which does not appear in the
ratebooks until 1736.
In 1735 Grosvenor Street was described as 'a spacious
well built Street, inhabited chiefly by People of Distinction'. (ref. 2) In the following year, of its 74 houses (not
including the corner houses with Grosvenor Square), 22
were occupied by titled inhabitants including one duke,
two future dukes and three earls. Of the other occupants
five were army officers, two were ambassadors and three
were churchmen (including the Bishop of Winchester and
the Rector of St. George's, Hanover Square). (ref. 3)
The houses originally built in the street varied
considerably in size, with frontages ranging from seventeen to fifty-five feet. There was no attempt at uniformity,
but the fairly narrow stylistic limits within which house
builders operated in the 1720's provided a certain
homogeneity which has now been totally dissipated. Most
of the houses had three main storeys and garrets with
façades of two-tone brickwork in shades of red and brown,
segmental-headed windows and flat doorcases with
projecting hoods. Twenty of the original houses survive in
some form, but most of these have been altered almost
beyond recognition. No. 16 (above the ground floor: Plate
9a, fig. 15) and No. 51 (despite Victorian additions) have
retained much of their original appearance although the
first-floor window openings have probably been tampered
with in both cases, and Nos. 43 (Plate 10d) and 60,
although altered, are still recognizably of the 1720's. At
No. 75, which was rebuilt in 1912, the original doorcase
was re-used and is a particularly fine example with
elaborately carved brackets.
The changes that had taken place by the end of the
century included the increasingly standardized location of
the dining-room on the ground floor remarked upon
elsewhere (see volume XXXIX, page 112). At nine houses on
the estate plans survive showing a readiness to aggrandize
one ground-floor room for this purpose at the expense of
the other even by the brutal expedient of moving the
dividing wall up to the chimney-breast of the lessened
room, thus destroying its proportion and symmetry. Of
these, six were in Grosvenor Street (Nos. 38, 48, 54, 58, 76
and the house later numbered 50 Grosvenor Square: see
fig. 41).
External changes are not well recorded. The Doric
portico at No. 66 (Plate 11a) was almost certainly added in
1793–4 by the speculating upholsterer Charles Elliott of
New Bond Street, and the slim Ionic porch at No. 43 (Plate
10d) was there by 1796. In his lectures at the Royal
Academy in 1809 (Sir) John Soane commented on the neoGreek portico at No. 53 (now demolished), (ref. 4) and the
drawings which accompanied the lecture (one of which is
reproduced as Plate 8c in volume XXXIX) also show
balconies with very slim iron railings resting on cantilevered supports both at No. 53 and No. 54. Porticoes (and
balconies) continued to be added to houses throughout the
nineteenth century, particularly during the years of the
second Marquess of Westminster between 1845 and 1869,
and at No. 50 a ponderous enclosed portico was added as
late as 1907.
The practice of adding an extra storey to the threestoreyed Georgian houses, which usually involved the
conversion of existing garrets into a square fourth storey
with additional garrets on top, also took place at various
times and cannot always be dated. But there were two
periods in particular when a number of houses were altered
in this way. The first was also during the years of the
second Marquess, when such 'improvements' were often
required as a matter of Estate policy. Nos. 18, 52, 69 and 74
are examples of surviving houses which are known to have
been heightened in these years. The other period was
during the Edwardian age when rich occupants often
found a need to provide even more accommodation in their
already large houses. Nos. 5, 43, 48, 50, 58 and 59 all had
storeys added between 1905 and 1910, and in 1912 No. 66,
while retaining three full storeys, had two floors of attics
built within a new roof.
Brick façades were occasionally stuccoed —those of Nos.
27 and 34 look to be quite early -and trimmings were
added to existing fronts, but the first evidence of a
complete rebuilding occurs in 1820–1, when Nos. 45 and
46 were rebuilt as one house (later completely transformed
as part of the present No. 46). In 1837–8 Thomas Cubitt
rebuilt three houses (Nos. 54, 77 and 78, all now
demolished), but it was not until the accession of the
second Marquess in 1845 that the outward appearance of
the street changed substantially. Then a deliberate policy
of updating existing Georgian houses by extensive
elevational improvements on the renewal of leases, some
aspects of which have already been noted, or alternatively
encouraging complete rebuilding, was inaugurated under
the rigorous control of the estate surveyor, Thomas Cundy
II. Some dozen houses were rebuilt with elevational
designs largely dictated (and in most cases drawn) by
Cundy. Most of these were on the north side of the street to
the east of Davies Street and all had similar characteristics
of channelled stucco on the ground floor, Doric open
porticoes and balconies with stone balustrades, white
Suffolk brickwork in the upper storeys, Italianate dressings to the windows and deep modillion cornices with
Vitruvian scroll friezes beneath. The effect on the street
can be seen in Plate 8a, and the best surviving examples,
despite alterations to the ground floor in each case, are
Nos. 17 and 23. Even where houses were not rebuilt their
façades were often extensively altered, the most dramatic
example being No. 52, where a fine Georgian brick front
was transformed by Cundy's designs into an equally
handsome Italianate one (figs. 16–17 in vol. XXXIX). Here
the brickwork, although it looks to have been renewed, is
red rather than grey-white, perhaps a miniscule concession
to the Georgian original.
One instance where Cundy did not entirely have his own
way was at Nos. 79 and 80 which were rebuilt to Sydney
Smirke's designs in 1852–3, but opposite at No. 5 in 1863
Smirke had to be more accommodating even though he did
manage to have some changes made to Cundy's first
elevational design.
Later Victorian rebuildings included the highly original
block by Balfour and Turner at Nos. 21 and 22 and the
group of pedestrian Queen Anne houses designed by
Edward I'Anson III at Nos. 6–9 (No. 9 having since been
demolished). These were, however, harbingers of other
changes in the last great age of the rich private resident of
Grosvenor Street up to, and a little beyond, the war of
1914–18. The rebuildings in this period ranged from
highly competent speculative jobs in the neo-Georgian
idiom at Nos. 26 and 75 (both by Wimperis and Simpson)
to large specially commissioned works such as C. W.
Stephens's disappointing mixture of Queen Anne and
Edwardian Baroque at No. 28 for Lord Edward SpencerChurchill or the magnificent Beaux-Arts mansion by Blow
and Billerey at No. 46 for the financier Sir Edgar Speyer. It
was in the interiors, however, that the opulence of the age
achieved its grandest expression. The inside of No. 46 is a
bizarre and jumbled mixture of the old and the new, the
genuine and the pastiche, and is more a reflection of great
wealth than of good taste, but the quality of the new work is
superb. Almost equally grand, although not a complete
rebuilding, was the recasting of No. 33 for Princess
Hatzfeldt by Turner Lord and Company in 1912. Here,
behind a new façade of crisply modelled stonework and
rich ironwork, an interior was lovingly assembled displaying the best in Edwardian woodcarving and plasterwork.
The ravages of commerce have destroyed much of this
Edwardian and post-Edwardian splendour. This is not to
say that commerce was entirely a newcomer. From the
beginning the Mount Coffee House stood at the eastern
approaches where the street narrows as it crosses the estate
boundary into the City of London's Conduit Mead
territory, and the Red Lion (later the Lion and Goat) was
almost opposite on the north side. The Three Tuns tavern
stood at the south-east corner with Davies Street, but no
doubt had its sign and main entrance discreetly situated in
the lesser street. Some of the houses at the eastern end were
taken by tradesmen from an early date (ref. 5) and by 1790 some
dozen houses were so occupied. (ref. 6)
When leases were renewed in the early nineteenth
century the further spread of trades was controlled but
even at some of the big houses a complete ban proved
impossible. In 1824 No. 16, after standing empty for some
years, was let to Thomas and George Seddon, upholsterers
and cabinet-makers; they were allowed to use the premises
as a showroom but not as a shop or manufactory. No
outward show of business was permitted, even at No. 74 in
1849 when a family of silk mercers converted the ground
and first floors into offices and 'magasins' behind a normal
domestic façade. A few private hotels were established
(though not on the scale of Brook Street), including
possibly the first premises of William Claridge at No. 9
from about 1850 to 1853, (ref. 7) and during the late nineteenth
century several houses were taken over by doctors and
dentists.
The Indian summer for the big houses in Grosvenor
Street which occurred at the end of the nineteenth century
and the beginning of the twentieth coincided with a
concerted attempt on the part of the Estate Board to rid the
street of most of its commercial element. In 1904 the Board
was 'of the opinion that Grosvenor Street should as far as
possible be maintained for private residential purposes
only', and several applications for the establishment of
businesses were turned down. (ref. 8) Collards, the piano-makers
who had taken over the Seddons' premises at No. 16, were
granted short-term renewals of their lease in 1888
and again in 1902, but it must have been seen as a vindication of the Board's policy when, in 1909, they assigned
their lease to Mrs Keppel, who restored the house
to private use. Even clubs were frowned upon, (ref. 9) but by
1925 there were four, all ladies' clubs, including the
American Women's Club in Speyer's mansion at No. 46. (ref. 7)
A more usual fate for the large houses vacated by private
residents was to be converted (as had some smaller houses
already) into dressmaking establishments. In 1926 this
happened to both Nos. 50 and 51. No. 18 followed in 1928,
No. 16 succumbed to this use in 1935 after its brief return
to private occupation, and in 1937 No. 66 was adapted for
use by a millinery and dressmaking concern. Such
conversions often involved fitting in workshops as well as
showrooms and offices (at No. 18, for instance, there was a
workforce of eighty-three in 1928 (ref. 10) ), with disastrous
consequences for the internal appearance of the houses.
The impossibility of stemming the advance of commerce was recognized by 1936 when a drawing showing
Hillier, Parker, May and Rowden's proposed large new
premises at Nos. 76–78 was endorsed 'shown to the Duke
and approved subject to details'. (ref. 11) Other visually intrusive
office blocks were designed in 1937 for Nos. 64–65 and
71–72. But if the retreat of the private resident was orderly
before the war of 1939–45, it afterwards became a rout.
Shop fronts, which had been rare before the war, now
proliferated, and the building at Nos. 9–13 in 1962–4 of a
large new block which was uncompromising in style as well
as scale was indicative of a fundamental change in the
character of the street. By 1971 no building in the street
was in single private occupation. (ref. 12)
Nos. 72 to 81 were renumbered in 1866.