CHAPTER VII
North Audley Street
North Audley Street today contains a number of fairly
undistinguished large buildings of the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, with their ground floors generally
given over to shops and restaurants. But it also possesses
one splendid eighteenth-century house, masked by an
unpromising stucco exterior, and a church of considerable
distinction.
Generally called Awdley or Awdeley Street in early
deeds, the street was named after Sir Hugh Audley, from
whom the estate had descended through Mary Davies to
the Grosvenor family. Both sides to the south of North
Row originally formed part of the 'hinterlands' of large
plots which had their principal frontages either to
Grosvenor Square or Upper Brook Street. The east side
was part of the ground taken by Edward Shepherd, the
architect and builder, under an agreement of March 1725, (ref. 1)
while the west side formed part of the very large area
contracted for by Robert Andrews, the estate agent, and
Thomas Barlow, the estate surveyor, at the same time. (ref. 2)
Although a few plots in the street were subsequently let to
builders under direct Grosvenor leases, most of the land
was let in large blocks to Shepherd or to Barlow and
Andrews respectively at very low ground rents with a
minimum of restrictive covenants, to be developed
virtually as they wished. (ref. 3)
On the west side this resulted in the building of a large
number of narrow-fronted houses from 1727 onwards,
some twelve, for instance, being packed into a little over
two hundred feet of frontage between Green Street and the
opening into Lees Place. (ref. 4) On the east side, with the
pragmatic approach that characterized much of his
building work, Shepherd was prepared to provide some
large and no doubt lavishly appointed houses alongside
others as small as most of those on the opposite side of the
street. Apart from the surviving No. 12, the house on the
site of No. 15, which had extensive grounds at the rear, was
imposing enough to sell for £1,000 in 1734, (ref. 5) while at the
south corner of North Row were two adjoining houses with
frontages of approximately forty feet each.
The northern of these two had the advantage of a corner
site with extensive stabling along North Row. It was
probably built in c. 1745 by Alexander Rouchead, mason,
to whom Shepherd had leased the site in 1737 (ref. 6) (and who,
himself, lived from 1736 until his death in 1776 in a house
on the north corner with North Row which may also have
had a frontage to Oxford Street (ref. 7) ). Its eighteenth-century
occupants included Captain William Burnaby, 1745–7;
the eleventh Viscount Dillon, 1747–51; Colonel (later
General) Noel, 1755–60; the third Earl of Sussex, 1764–71;
Sir John Chetwode, third baronet, 1775–9; Fulke Greville,
1782–94; and the Hon. John Charles Villiers from 1796. (ref. 8)
In 1795 Greville, who had apparently spent a good deal of
money on the house and had run into debt in consequence,
sold it for a little over £3,000 to Villiers, who was the
brother of the second Earl of Clarendon, and who soon
enlarged it by taking in part of the adjoining house to the
south. (ref. 9) This remained his town house after he succeeded
his brother as third Earl in 1824. He died in 1838 but the
Dowager Countess continued to live there until her death
in the house in 1844. (ref. 10) In the same year Clarendon House,
as it was then known, was sold to James Ponsford, who,
though styling himself 'architect', was principally a
speculative builder. He pulled it down and in its place
erected several houses with ground-floor shops in North
Audley Street and workshops in North Row, also since
demolished. (ref. 11) There is no known visual record of
Clarendon House but, with a sixty-foot front to North
Audley Street and a long return frontage with stabling and
offices in North Row, it had the very large rateable value of
£550 shortly before its demolition. (ref. 12)
Other persons of social distinction lived elsewhere in the
street during the eighteenth century. Sir Cordell Firebrace, third baronet, occupied a house on the site of No. 13
from 1743 until his death in 1759, as did briefly the
Marquess of Granby, son of the third Duke of Rutland, in
1762. Lady Rachel Austen, who was a sister of Sir Francis
Dashwood, acquired the lease of No. 15, since rebuilt, in
1745 and lived there, with some intervals, when she
apparently let the house, until her death in 1788. Lady
Dillon, probably the Dowager Viscountess, widow of the
ninth Viscount, occupied a house on the west side from
1741 to 1751. (ref. 13) This house, later numbered 26 and
approximately on the site of the present No. 26, was the
only house of fair size on this side of the street and was later
occupied by the Berry family, friends and correspondents
of Horace Walpole, from 1790 to 1824. (ref. 14) The notable
inhabitants of the surviving Nos. 11 and 12 are given in the
account of those houses.
Edward Shepherd occupied two houses on the east side,
no doubt while he was supervising building operations in
the street. He lived in a house on part of the site of No. 13
from 1730 until 1732 and then in one on the site of No. 16
in 1733 and from 1735 until 1740. (ref. 15) Shepherd's neighbour
was George Hill, probably the elder brother of his wife, a
'carver in wood and stone', whose name frequently appears
as a payee in Shepherd's bank account. (ref. 16)
By 1790 most of the occupants in the street were
tradesmen. They included three grocers, two greengrocers, a fishmonger, a butcher, a poulterer and a baker;
three peruke-makers, two haberdashers, a tailor and a
shoemaker; two apothecaries, a coal dealer, a stationer, a
saddler, a cabinet-maker, a carpenter, a corn chandler and
a plain chandler. (ref. 17) There were also four public houses, all
of which were still in existence in the later 1860's; by 1894,
however, the first Duke of Westminster's anti-drink
campaign had reduced their numbers to one—the
Marlborough Head, which still survives at the corner of
North Row. (ref. 18)
Despite the predominance of commercial interests and
the unsatisfactory nature of much of the immediate
neighbourhood — in 1795 a timber yard, a brewery and
Gillows' workshops were in close proximity to the houses
on the east side (ref. 19) —the street retained some social cachet in
the early nineteenth century. The first house on the east
side to the north of Grosvenor Square, generally known as
No. 1 North Audley Street, was built in c. 1806 on part of
the curtilage of No. 21 Grosvenor Square by Peter Denys,
a Swiss emigrant's son who had married the daughter of
the second Earl of Pomfret. (ref. 20) According to Boyle's Court
Guide Lord Palmerston, the future Prime Minister, was
living here in 1807, and the third Earl of Pomfret was the
occupant from 1810 until his death in 1830. (ref. 21) The house
was then purchased by the brother-in-law of Maria
Edgeworth, the novelist, whose descriptions of the
interior, and of her 'own—own room' there, survive in
manuscript. (ref. 22) These show that it was a wide, well-lit,
shallow house having ceiling heights of twelve, fourteen
and ten feet on the first three storeys. At the front, firstfloor casement windows opened to a continuous balcony
painted 'cane color'. On the ground floor a parlour was oilpainted a 'mud colour' and the dining-room, which Maria
thought looked particularly well by candlelight, a 'drabfawn'. Here and on the first floor the doors were painted
like oak, except the wide 'grandee doors' of the drawingrooms, which simulated satinwood. These drawing-rooms
were papered in a brown fern-leaf pattern on a pale buff
ground with a gold-beaded border, and the first-floor
library oil-painted 'a kind of Heron's egg color'. On the
bedroom floor the doors were all white-painted and the
rooms papered. The servants' rooms above and below were
partly or fully carpeted which Maria considered an
unheard-of luxury. One staircase window was roundheaded and glazed with ground glass within an orange and
purple border, giving 'a pretty Claude Lorraine view of
trees behind'. The house was demolished in 1855 for the
rebuilding of No. 21 Grosvenor Square. (ref. 23) As in the case of
Clarendon House no visual record of its appearance has
come to light.
With the notable exception of Nos. 11 and 12 all the
remaining houses have been rebuilt at least once, some
sites having been occupied by as many as four successive
buildings. During the rebuilding of the west side in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the width of the
street was increased from some forty to sixty feet by setting
back the building line. (ref. 24)