A few doors from the “rond-point” in Brompton Road is a Tube station; and the workmen, as they bore close to the triangular grass-covered enclosure in front of Tattersall’s, are probably unaware that a comparatively slight deviation would take them through a pit beneath the enclosure, which, tradition avers, was used, during the Great Plague of London, for the dead. It is likely enough; for centuries ago there existed, a little to the east of Albert Gate, a hospital belonging to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster, which in 1665 was given up for the use of infected patients; and as this little piece of ground has never been disturbed, it probably was originally the burying-place attached to the hospital, and was converted into a plague-pit.
A house close to Hyde Park Court was once occupied by Charles Reade, the novelist. At a house close by (long since pulled down), Horace Smith, joint-author of Rejected Addresses, lived from 1810 to 1818, and drove himself daily to and from the City—he was then a stockbroker—in a vehicle called a “whisky.” A little farther on, where the London and County Bank is dwarfed by the late Sir Herbert Naylor Leyland’s great mansion, used to stand the “Fox and Bull,” a quaint old tavern dating back to Queen Elizabeth’s time, and a favourite resort of Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Morland, and other painters. Holy Trinity Chapel, St. George’s Place, no longer wedged in between two public-houses, replaces an old church where the celebrated Prime Minister—then plain Robert Walpole—was married in 1700 to a Lord Mayor’s daughter, who became the mother of Sir Horace Walpole. In St. George’s Place, where it faces the Park—surely one of the most desirable of situations, the first intimation that we are approaching “Green pastures and Piccadilly”—is the Hyde Park Corner Station of the new railway, next door to No. 8, conspicuous as the residence of the Baden-Powell family, on the site of which house, in an old-fashioned tenement, lived for many years John Liston, the comedian identified with the character of “Paul Pry.” Being freehold—a unique feature in the neighbourhood—this small plot of ground has cost the Company dear. It had to pay £30,750 for its acquisition.
It is hard to believe that at this point London once terminated, Lanesborough House, where St. George’s Hospital stands, being described in Pennant’s days as a “country mansion,” and thus it remained until little more than a century ago. While in the time of Charles the Second, near Hamilton Place was an inn, bearing the sign of the “Hercules Pillars,” signifying that, like the “First and Last House” at Land’s End, no habitation existed beyond it.
All sorts and conditions of people, mostly distinguished, live, and have lived, along this part of the route, which has its Tube stations at Down Street and Dover Street. There is Apsley House, and next to it Baron Rothschild’s mansion. At No. 1 Hamilton
FIG. 14. THE WESTERN APPROACH TO PICCADILLY.
Place lived the great Lord Chancellor Eldon. From 139, Piccadilly (Lord Glenesk’s) Lady Byron, after one of her quarrels with the poet, fled with her infant daughter. At Nos. 138 and 139, formerly one building, the Marquis of Queensbury (the notorious “Old Q.”) used, when an octogenarian, to sit at a certain window for hours, and ogle the passing fair sex. Gloucester House adjoining, is the residence of the Duke of Cambridge, occupied, when it was Elgin House, by the Earl of Elgin, who brought over to England the famous marbles that bear his name. Nearly opposite Down Street, on the park side of Piccadilly, stands a curious reminder that once upon a time, parcels and packages of all kinds had to be conveyed all over London, not by train or by Carter Paterson’s speedy vans, but on the shoulders of stalwart porters. It is a “bulk,” replacing an old timber one. A “bulk,” it may be explained, is a kind of shelf supported by two posts at a convenient height for the bearers of burdens to temporarily dispose of them and rest awhile. On the site of No. 106 (the St. James’s Club) was formerly the “Greyhound,” a very old inn, which, with the “White Horse” close by, and the “Half Moon,” a little further on, was a favourite pulling-up place for the numerous carriers, tranters, and market-gardeners who were incessantly coming from the country to town; for Piccadilly was one of London’s great highways westward. In a house (now a club) at the corner of White Horse Street, Sir Walter Scott sometimes stayed when in town. Cambridge House (the Naval and Military Club) recalls Lord Palmerston and the notable political receptions of his accomplished wife. At the corner of Clarges Street, where lived Edmund Kean and also Lady Hamilton, is the Turf Club, and at No. 84 the Imperial Service Club, the last of Piccadilly’s line of clubs that, commencing with The Bachelors’, at the corner of Hamilton Place, forms a kind of approach to the real club-land of St. James’s Street and Pall Mall. Bath House, at the corner of Bolton Street, was the residence of the late millionaire, Baron Hirsch. No. 80, Piccadilly, and No. 1, Stratton Street together form the town house of the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, and it was from No. 80 that her father, Sir Francis Burdett, M.P., was, in 1810, amidst serious rioting, taken to the Tower for having made use of bad language in the House of Commons. From the roof can be obtained a splendid view of the Westminster and Pimlico district, across the Park, rightly called “Green,” with its beautiful stretches of turf and graceful trees, and far away to the Surrey Hills and the Crystal Palace.
Devonshire House, seen through its fine old iron gates—brought here from Chiswick—is plain enough externally, but its saloons are very handsome, and here the lovely Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, reigned as Queen of Fashion long ago. Arlington Street reminds us of the Marquis of Salisbury, of Earl Nelson, who lodged here, and of Sir Horace Walpole and his father. In Albemarle Street, Percy Bysshe Shelley once had quarters at Cooke’s Hotel.
The Tube now carries its passengers ninety feet below the beautiful Piccadilly shops, past St. James’s Street and Bond Street, the Burlington Arcade and Burlington House, past the Egyptian Hall, past Fortnum and Mason’s—so universally associated with hampers, long-necked bottles, and race-meetings; past the Albany, where lived Byron, Lytton, and Lord Macaulay; past the Prince’s Restaurant, and its neighbour, St. James’s Church, where there are some splendid specimens of Grinling Gibbons’ wood-carving, and where, in 1762, occurred a singular thing. In some unexplained manner the vaults caught fire, and two hundred coffins with their inmates underwent an uncontemplated process of cremation; past St. James’s Hall opposite (eventually to be enlarged and converted to purposes other than harmony only). And now Piccadilly Circus, where six roads meet, and where, next to Spiers and Pond’s Restaurant, is the Piccadilly Circus Station of this, the longest Tube. Subways should certainly be arranged for access to this station, to avoid the very dangerous crossings from each of the six roads. Why does not the London County Council, emulating the City Fathers and their Mansion House subterranean passages, undertake this beneficent work in the West End?