It was in Hanover Square that the fine building erected by Sir John Gallini in 1771, was opened as the Hanover Square Concert Rooms, where John Christian Bach gave for eight years a series of concerts, and where later the “Ancient Music Society,” and later still, the Philharmonic Society, drew crowded audiences, and may be regarded as the first serious and successful attempts to make classical music popular in this country. In 1862 the rooms were enlarged and redecorated, and, as the “Queen’s Concert Rooms” held on gallantly for thirteen years, when they went the way of all musical flesh in London!
Let us now return and cross Bond Street, and, casting an eye up South Molton Street, where a stone on No. 36 indicates that the thoroughfare was formed in 1721; and not forgetting that the painter-poet and extraordinary visionary William Blake was living there, at No. 17, in 1807, let us wander up Brook Street.
BROOK STREET.
With Brook Street we enter into the purlieus of Mayfair, which stands for the West End, as Whitechapel does for the East, in those points of social habit characteristic of the two extreme quarters of the town.
Like so many of the thoroughfares in this quarter of London, Brook Street has gone through its second and third baptism, for first it was called Little Brook Street, and later Lower Brook Street. The stream once known as the Tyburn, which followed in its course South Molton Lane, across Brook Street, through the gardens of Lansdowne House to Buckingham Palace, is responsible for the name of Brook Street, but the pedestrian will need to pass over no bridges now on his way to Pimlico.
Statesmen and doctors, musicians and painters, have all in the past helped to give an interest to Brook Street, which to-day must chiefly rely on its fashionable residents, with here and there a stray politician, for what of interest it may be said to possess. It is still undoubtedly a fine street, and not a few of its houses help to carry us back to past days. Once Edmund Burke lived in it, at what is now No. 72. The great Handel’s spinet may have been heard through the open windows of No. 57 as he tried, shall we say, the exquisite air from “Rinaldo,” or gave the finishing touches to that “Water music” which was to charm (if his ears ever could be charmed by sweet sounds) his gracious Majesty King George II. We had better not intrude too curiously into the workshop of genius, or we might receive a shock, if we found its master not intent on some inspired number from the “Messiah,” but spoiling one of his few books (a presentation copy, perchance, and oh! the feelings of the author), with fingers greasy with muffins, or indulging in one of his gargantuan feasts at which he alone was “de gompany.” It would be like coming upon the great Beethoven, not in the throes of the Ninth Symphony, or the “Waldstein”; but hurling cups and saucers at his terrified maidservant!
Not far from Handel’s lodgings (on the wall of which, by the bye, a tablet reposes) a painter, and an engraver plied their quieter arts and laboured in their “unregarded hours,” for here both Gerard Vandergucht and his artist son Benjamin lived, and here were finished, with infinite pains, those engravings in which the elder man reproduced the refinement of Vandyck and the strength of Dobson. Thomas Barker (Barker of Bath, as he is termed) also painted in Brook Street; and the healing-art has been represented here by such medical names to conjure disease with as Jenner and Gull, Williams, Savory, and Broadbent. Sir Charles Bell, who died here in 1832, and Lord Davey, who happily is still with us, represent science; and Lord Lake, one of the famous of those, who, as Carlyle put it, “get their living by being killed”—the art of war.
Dear old Mrs. Delany, who was always young, and yet makes us think of her as always old and charming, lived here; and Sydney Smith, with whom we are for ever meeting (never too often, however), cut his jokes, (in which was often hidden so much genial philosophy), in Brook Street, among innumerable other places in London; while readers of “Dombey and Son” will remember that Cousin Feenix’s “dull and dreary” residence was in this fashionable thoroughfare. Claridge’s Hotel is in Brook Street, as most people know; but it looks very different to-day to what it must have done when the father of “Little Dorrit” stayed there on his return from the Continent.
GROSVENOR STREET.
By taking a short cut down Avery Row we shall find ourselves in Grosvenor Street, which was formed about 1726, and was a later addition to that great building development which was begun by Sir Richard Grosvenor in 1695. In size and appearance it is analogous to Brook Street. If Lord Balcarres lives in the former, have we not Earl Carrington in the latter? If Brook Street can boast Lord Davey, cannot Grosvenor Street glory in the presence of Queen Victoria’s trusted physician, Sir James Reid; and till recently the Right Hon. James Lowther, Speaker of the House of Commons, and officially first of the untitled ones of England? And in the past a similar comparison could be sustained. We have noted some of the interesting residents of a bygone day in Brook Street; let us glance for a moment at those who once lived here. We can begin with a Prime Minister; for Lord North, that amiable and somnolent first Minister of the Crown, whose equanimity allowed him to peacefully doze while the Opposition was successfully voting the overthrow of his Government, lived here, in 1740; in the same year Sir Paul Methuen, the ancestor of Lord Methuen, the distinguished soldier of our own day, was residing here. Then there is that Miss Lane, notorious if for nothing else, at least for being the mistress of Frederick, Prince of Wales—the “Fritz” of many a popular, and generally scurrilous, ballad.