Chesterfield Street joins Chesterfield Gardens, which stand on the site of the once ample grounds of Chesterfield House. George Selwyn dates many of his letters from one of the houses in this street; while Beau Brummell was residing in another, No. 4, till 1810, and here he was visited often enough by the Prince of Wales, who sometimes remained so late that he was compelled, says Jesse, to insist on Brummell giving him a quiet dinner, which not uncommonly ended in a midnight debauch.
PARK LANE.
Park Lane stands alone among the streets of London. In that it has only one side, and looks directly into one of London’s Parks, it might at first seem to have some analogy to the western end of Piccadilly; but Piccadilly is made up of clubs, with here and there a business establishment and—except at Hyde Park Corner itself—private houses but sparsely scattered down it; whereas Park Lane practically consists of the mansions of the wealthy. So much so is this the case, indeed, that it has latterly become synonymous with worldly riches, and is now the objective at which Socialistic and democratic stump orators level their sarcasms from their convenient vantage ground within the park railings; what time the law in helmet and white gloves smiles tolerantly, and the plutocrats lunch unmoved.
It will be well to start from its northern end, where it joins Oxford Street, or the Tyburn Road, as it was once called, for Park Lane used formerly to be known as Tyburn Lane, and close by the Marble Arch—permanently at rest after its journey from the front of Buckingham Palace—was Tyburn Tree, where the end of innumerable malefactors drew crowds of excited and unseemly witnesses.
It is somewhat anomalous that this “glass of fashion” among streets should have been, so comparatively recently as 1769, connected with such gruesome associations; but it is also equally difficult to imagine it as the dreary, unkept by-way which it was during the Augustan age, when millionaires were not; and the petrol of the motor was not smelt in the road.
GREAT HOUSES OF PARK LANE.
The first of the great mansions we come to is Brook House, which stands at the corner of Upper Brook Street. It was designed by Wyatt, and was for many years the residence of Lord Tweedmouth, and noted for the receptions held here, when the Liberal Party indulged in its revels.
A step and we come to Dudley House, built by the late Lord Dudley, and once the casket that contained many of those wonders of art which this most princely of peers loved to gather around him.
At the corner of Upper Grosvenor Street stands a sort of magnificent temple dedicated to music and the fine arts. This is the concert or ballroom which the late Duke of Westminster, apparently regardless of architectural symmetry, added to Grosvenor House, which is seen behind it. It reminds me of nothing so much as a beautiful pearl which has succeeded in emerging from the parent shell, but not wholly detaching itself from the parental ligaments.
As we have seen, the entrance to Grosvenor House is in Park Street; but I said nothing about the mansion then, because it seems to belong, as does its vast garden extending to Mount Street, to Park Lane. The residence, which was known as Gloucester House, at the time when the Duke of Gloucester, brother of George III., acquired it in 1761, is, of course, one of the great, as differentiated from merely large, houses of London, and it contains a collection of pictures and works of art which a millionaire would have to exhaust his fortune in purchasing, and which could only be adequately described by a Waagen or a Smith.