Mount Street dates from about 1740, but since then it has been wholly rebuilt with red-brick structures, the majority of which are now shops, with flats above them, and thus preserves nothing of its earlier character, when such as Lady Mary Coke, the compiler of a most valuable and delightful diary, Fanny Burney (Madame D’Arblay), whose work in the same direction is, known to all the world, and Sir Henry Holland, who has also left us his reminiscences, lived in it.
From Mount Street we pass easily, by way of South Audley Street, to that congeries of thoroughfares, which lie between Berkeley Square and Park Lane.
ALDFORD STREET.
If we take those on the east, we shall first come to Aldford Street, which was known for a century and a half (until 1886) as Chapel Street. Much of the street has been rebuilt, and therefore some of its intrinsic interest has disappeared, notably the house in which Beau Brummell once lived, and where he was wont to receive the Prince Regent at those “petits soupers,” and at those wonderful ceremonies of the toilet, the details of which Captain Jesse has recorded with so much gusto. But a greater than Brummell was once a resident in Aldford Street, for, at No. 23, the poet Shelley was staying in the same year (1813) in which we have encountered him in Half Moon Street. Beyond this solitary celebrity, however, there is nothing to delay our passing on to South Street, which runs parallel to Aldford Street in a southerly direction.
SOUTH STREET.
This street was formed about 1737, and till nearly the middle of the 18th century, the chapel attached to the Portuguese Embassy (formerly at 74, South Audley Street), where Garrick was married, was situated in it.
Brummell once lived here (at No. 24), and so did, in 1837, Lord Melbourne (at No. 39), while among other names of note connected with it mention may be made of Charles James Fox, Lord and Lady Holland, and John Allen, so indissolubly connected with the annals of Holland House; Mademoiselle d’Este, the daughter of the Duke of Sussex; the Duke of Orleans, better known as Philippe Egalité, and Miss Florence Nightingale whose name is a household word in two hemispheres.
DEANERY AND TILNEY STREETS.
Deanery Street passes by the side of Dorchester House (which I must leave for notice till we reach Park Lane) to Tilney Street. The former, a small serpentining thoroughfare, takes its name from the Dean and Chapter of Westminster, who are the ground-landlords, and to whom Lord Chesterfield made an amusing reference in his will. It was first called “Dean and Chapter Street,” and was formed at the same time as South Street.
Tilney Street is perhaps chiefly remembered as the residence of Mrs. Fitzherbert, whose house was at the corner facing Park Lane, the bow windows of which still indicate it. Here it was that, in June, 1800, after their temporary separation, Mrs. Fitzherbert and her husband, George, Prince of Wales, were openly reconciled at a public breakfast, which “proclaimed to the fashionable world of London that her relations with the Prince were resumed on the old footing.”