Hampstead and Marylebone

by G. E. Mitton

In Nutford Place is St. Luke's Church, built in the Early English style in 1854. It stands on the site of a cholera hospital, which was not used during the great epidemic of 1849, as there was not a single case in the parish. The church was built in memory of this great deliverance.

The Marylebone Presbyterian church stands between Upper George Street and Little Queen Street.

Upper Berkeley Street contains a Jewish Synagogue, built in 1870 for Jewish dissenters. Brunswick Chapel was built in 1684 by Evelyn Cosway for Lady Berkeley.

In Bryanston Street there is a synagogue which was built for the Spanish and Portuguese Jews resident at the West End. This has been recently superseded by a much larger building in Lauderdale Road, Sutherland Avenue. Quebec Chapel was built in 1788, and is now called the Church of the Annunciation. It has numbered among its incumbents Dr. Alford and Dr. Goulburn, later Deans of Canterbury and Norwich respectively, and Dr. Magee. The number of chapels of every denomination thus shown to cluster in this district is curious.

Great Cumberland Place is fashionable still. This was formerly Great Cumberland Street, and was called after the Duke whose name is associated with Culloden. It leads us out nearly opposite to the Marble Arch.

Oxford Street.—Lysons says the north side of the street was completed in 1729, and then called Oxford Street. But against this statement there is the fact that a stone built into a house at the corner of Rathbone Place was dated "Rathbone Place in Oxford Street, 1718." Pennant remembers Oxford Street "a deep hollow road and full of sloughs, with here and there a ragged house, the lurking place of cut-throats."

Its chief association will always be that of the many dismal processions going to Tyburn, when some poor wretch, tied upright in a jolting cart with his coffin in front of him, was taken in face of all the world from Newgate to the gallows to "make a public holiday." The slow grinding of the wheels, the jeers and shouts, the scuffling of those who would be foremost not to miss one tremor of agony, must have combined to form a torture felt even by the most hardened criminal. The scene must have been more degrading still when the punishment was that the victim should be flogged at the cart-tail.

The terrible procession is familiar to all from Hogarth's illustration "On the way to Tyburn," one of the series of Idle and Industrious Apprentices. Here he shows people among the crowd sinking up to their knees in mire, thus proclaiming the state of the principal highways in the eighteenth century.

The present Oxford Street is a wide and handsome thoroughfare, with many splendid shops lining either side. There are no buildings of any public importance. The Princess's Theatre occupies the site of a large bazaar known as Queen's Bazaar. It has been many times remodelled and rebuilt. The latest rebuilding was in 1879. Its chief claim to notice is that here took place Kean's famous Shakespearian revivals.

The part of the borough lying to the north of Oxford Street includes both the oldest and the most aristocratic quarters. Bryanston and Montagu Squares have been already noticed.