Their failure to run directly into Portland Place (see dotted lines) is a relic of Foley House which occupied the site of the Langham Hotel, and interposed its gardens where these streets would have joined. It was afterwards intended to build a Queen Anne Square at the foot of Great Portland Street, but this project fell through.
[89] There were many ponds in the fields on which the streets of St. Pancras and Marylebone are built. In an early view of Whitefield’s Tabernacle, a pond is delineated on a spot now covered, as nearly as may be judged, by Torrington Square. Farther west, on the site of Duke Street, Portland Place, was the Cockney Ladle, in which small boys bathed at the risk of having their clothes seized by the parish beadles. Close by this—on the site of the backs of the east side of Harley Street—was the Marylebone Basin, a dangerously deep water. Many drownings occurred in ponds of which no trace or memory remains. Thus, the St. James’s Chronicle of August 8, 1769, says: “Two young chairmen [i.e. carriers of sedan chairs] were unfortunately drowned on Friday Evening last, in a Pond behind the North-Side of Portman-Square. They had been beating a Carpet in the Square, and being thereby warm and dirty agreed to bathe in the above Pond, not being aware of its great Depth. The Man who first went in could swim, and while he was swimming his Companion went in, but being presently out of his Depth he sunk. The Swimmer immediately made to the Place to save his Companion; but he, coming up again under the Swimmer, laid fast hold of him, and they both sunk down together and were drowned.”
[90] “On Friday last, Mr. Carlile, a Quaker of about 17 years of age, had the misfortune to fall into Marylebone-Bason, and was drowned” (Daily Advertiser, June 18, 1744).
[91] And from their contiguity to a French Protestant chapel, founded in 1756.
[92] The difficulty of writing recent history is exemplified by Smith in his account of Marylebone Gardens, which is far excelled by Mr. Warwick Wroth’s chapter on Marylebone Gardens in his London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century (1896). Fully to annotate Smith’s chronology of these gardens would require many pages, and the result would be unsatisfactory. I shall therefore deal with only the more prominent names he mentions.
[93] May 7, 1668.
[94] M. Wroth says: “In 1691 the place was known as Long’s Bowling Green at the Rose, and for several years (circ. 1679-1736) persons of quality might have been seen bowling there during the summer-time.
‘At the Groom Porters battered bullies play;
Some Dukes at Marybone bowl time away.’”