While many others do resort
For cakes and ale to Tottenham Court.’
In Pennant’s time, Oxford Street, then Oxford Road, had only a few houses on the north side of it. He remembered it ‘a deep hollow road, full of sloughs, with here and there a ragged house, the lurking-place of cut-throats’—a state of things the contrast to which was set forth in some crude lines of a song that a venerable relative, who died at the age of ninety-six, has often repeated to me, but of which I only remember—
‘That was the time for games and gambols,
When Oxford Street was covered with brambles,
Ponds, and sloughs, and running water,
Where now there’s nothing but bricks and mortar.’
This semi-rural state of things appears to have lasted west of Holborn for the first quarter of the present century. When Bedford House was built (1706), the north side of Queen’s Square was purposely left open that the inhabitants might enjoy the charming prospect before it, terminating in the Hampstead and Highgate Hills.
When Portland Place was planned, more than half a century later, the then Lord Foley insisted on a clause in a lease he held of the Duke of Portland to prevent the building of any street to intercept the pure air of Hampstead and Highgate from Foley House, a fact to which the width of Portland Place is attributable.[12]
Gray, writing from Southampton Row as late as the summer of 1759, tells his friend Palgrave that ‘his new territories command Bedford Garden, and all the fields as far as Hampstead and Highgate.’[13]