AT THE "BOWL."
Leaving the "Bowl" and threading the narrow passage of High Street, Bloomsbury, the processions, passing St. Giles's Pound, came into the "Tyburn Road," called sometimes "the Oxford Road," and now, and since about 1718, styled Oxford Street. Lysons, in his Environs of London, says the row of the first few houses on the north side of Tyburn Road westward of the Tottenham Court Road, was completed in 1729, and then it was first called Oxford Street; but he is clearly in error, for until about 1888 there remained built into the wall of No. 1, Oxford Street, on the south side, at the first-floor level, an oval tablet inscribed, "This is Oxford Streete, 1725." When the houses were rebuilt, this simple relic disappeared. But a still earlier tablet remains to disprove Lysons. This is one built into the wall of a house at the corner of Rathbone Place, which announces "Rathbones Place in Oxford Street 1718." The omission of the possessive case apostrophe has a somewhat gruesome effect, when we consider the old story of Oxford Street; but the side street was then the property of a certain Captain Rathbone. Oxford Street then had a very unenviable reputation. Pennant's description of it in his own youthful days forms interesting reading.
"I remember Oxford Street," he says, "a deep hollow road, and full of sloughs; with here and there a ragged house, the lurking-place of cut-throats: insomuch that I was never taken that way by night in my hackney-coach, to a worthy uncle's, who gave me lodgings in his house in George Street, but I went in dread the whole way."
Rathbone Place did not long remain the most westerly street. By 1725 a good deal of the parish of St. George, Hanover Square, on the opposite side of the road, was in existence, and was at once fashionable; and Thomas Street, with its tablet dated 1725, shows that, originally as "Bird Street," it had carried the bricks and mortar tide still further.
