Exeter Street
The present Exeter Street was built partly on
property belonging to the Cecil family and partly
on ground formerly belonging to the Bedford
estate which had been granted away in 1617.
Only the north side of the street is in the former
parish of St. Paul.
As laid out by Lord Burghley in 1673 Exeter
Street was blocked at its west end (some 100
feet beyond the corner of Burleigh Street) by the
boundary wall of Mr. Bagley's garden (not, as
stated in Strype's Survey, by the wall of Bedford
House garden (ref. 121) ). (fn. a) The street was subsequently
extended westward, at some time before 1708,
over the site of Bagley's garden as far as the back
wall of a house on the east side of Southampton
Street. Until c. 1831 this westward extension was
known as (Great) Denmark Court. Rocque's
map (Plate 7) shows that Denmark Court was
linked to the Strand by a narrow passage which
was also known as Denmark, or Little Denmark
Court.
In May 1826, while the Bill for improving
Charing Cross and the West Strand area was
before Parliament, the Commissioners of Woods,
Forests and Land Revenues published a plan for
widening the Strand which also showed a proposed westward extension of Exeter Street as
far as Southampton Street. (ref. 123) This proposal for
Exeter Street was not adopted: instead the Commissioners built a north—south street from the
Strand to the west end of Exeter Street over the
site of Little Denmark Court. (ref. 124) It was opened
in c. 1831 and took the name of Exeter Street. (ref. 125)
In 1720 Strype described the street as 'well
inhabited' (ref. 121) although from the first the residents
appear to have been mainly tradesmen. Dr.
Johnson, who lived here in 1737, lodged with a
staymaker—Richard Norris. (ref. 126) The site of
Norris's house, which was on the north side, has
been taken into the roadway of Wellington
Street. (ref. 16) During part of the eighteenth century
the vestry of St. Paul's leased two houses on the
north side for use as a parish workhouse. (ref. 127)
The inaugural meeting of the London Corresponding Society was held in January 1792 at
the Bell Tavern which stood on the north side
of the street (on part of the site now occupied by
the Old Bell public house, see page 228). Thomas
Hardy, the shoemaker who was the founder and
first secretary of the society, described the
meeting: 'They [the founder-members] had
finished their daily labour, and met there by
appointment. After having had their bread and
cheese and porter for supper, as usual, and their
pipes afterwards, with some conversation on the
hardness of the times and the dearness of all the
necessaries of life, which they, in common with
their fellow citizens, felt to their sorrow, the
business for which they met was brought forward
—Parliamentary Reform'. They arranged to
meet weekly and the Bell probably continued to
be their venue for several weeks, for a broadsheet
setting out the aims of the society was issued from
there in April. (ref. 128)
Most of the original houses were rebuilt in
1732 but none earlier than c. 1820 survives today.
Several houses collapsed during the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries and their sites were
left unbuilt. One nineteenth-century building
which does not survive was a short-lived public
exhibition room at the north-west corner of the
street erected in 1848–9 by Edward Marmaduke
Clarke, an optician. It is listed in the Post
Office Directory for 1851 as the Royal Panopticon
Institute of Science, which later removed to
Leicester Square. (ref. 129) By 1856 the Panopticon's
building in Exeter Street had been taken over by
The News of the World printing house. (ref. 76)
During the latter half of the nineteenth century the Dukes of Bedford acquired the freehold
of most of the sites on the north side, west of
Wellington Street. (ref. 130) These purchases were
made partly to facilitate the northward extension
of Burleigh Street (ref. 131) but they also provided new
buildings on the south side of Tavistock Street,
where sites had hitherto been rather restricted,
with a rear frontage to Exeter Street. Today
much of the frontage of Exeter Street is taken
up by the rear and side elevations of buildings in
other streets, notably the Strand Palace Hotel.
The social character of the street during the
first half of the nineteenth century is indicated in a
protest from the vestry clerk, on behalf of the
ratepayers, to the Commissioners of Woods and
Forests in 1834. This described how the tradespeople 'who had lived in Exeter Street for many
years in comfort and respectability' had been
seriously inconvenienced by the long delay in
completing the building up of Wellington Street.
According to the clerk some of the inhabitants
'have been reduced to poverty and have been
compelled to seek charitable or parochial assistance'. (ref. 132)
A few years later, in 1842, a complaint from
the ratepayers themselves shows how difficult,
from another cause, housekeeping in the street
had become; indeed they asserted that it would be
'impossible for respectable families to continue
residents if surrounded by so gross an immorality'
as then prevailed. The complainants were particularly critical of Mrs. Crutchley's house,
'where scenes of the grossest infamy are daily
exposed. The house appears to be the resort of
women of the lowest description whose screams
throughout the greater part of the night keep the
neighbourhood in a constant state of annoyance.
Cries of murder have made it necessary frequently
to call in the Police. Women in a state of almost
perfect nudity and drunkenness are constantly
exposing themselves in the yard of the said premises over which the windows of our houses look
to the constant annoyance of ourselves, our wives
and families.' (ref. 133) Their complaint seems to have
had no immediate effect. Whether Mrs. Crutchley's nuisance was abated or not the householders
were to have no respite, for a year or two later
an infants' school was established among the
much-tried inhabitants of this street. (ref. 134)