In Little Russell Street are the parochial schools. These were established in 1705 in Museum Street, and were removed in 1880 to the present building. They were founded by Dr. Carter for the maintenance, clothing, and education of twenty-five girls, and the clothing and education of eighty boys. The intentions of the founder are still carried out, as recorded on a stone slab on the front of the building, which is a neat brick edifice, with a group of a woman and child in stone in a niche high up, and an appropriate verse from Proverbs below.
Allusion has already been made to New Oxford Street. It extends from Tottenham Court Road to Bury Street, and is lined by fine shops and large buildings, chiefly in the ornamental stuccoed style. The Royal Arcade—"a glass-roofed arcade of shops extending along the rear of four or five of the houses, and having an entrance from the street at each end"—was opened about 1852, but did not answer the expectations formed of it, and was pulled down (Walford).
At the corner of Museum Street, once Peter Street, is Mudie's famous library. The founder, who died in 1890, began a lending library in King Street in 1840, and in 1852 removed to the present quarters. In 1864 the concern was turned into a limited liability company. The distribution of books now reaches almost incredible figures.
Great Russell Street Strype describes as being very handsome and very well inhabited. Thanet House, the town residence of the Thanets in the seventeenth century, stood on the north side. Sir Christopher Wren built a house for himself in this street. Among the inhabitants and lodgers have been Shelley and Hazlitt, J. P. Kemble, Speaker Onslow, Pugin the elder, Charles Mathews the elder, and, in later years, Sir E. Burne-Jones.
At the west end Great Russell Street runs into Tottenham Court Road, a portion of which lies in the parish of St. Giles. Toten Hall itself, from which the name is taken, stood at the south end of the Hampstead Road, and an account of it belongs to the parish of St. Pancras. There is little to remark upon in that part of the Road we can now claim. At the south end is Meux's well-known brewery, bought by the family of that name in 1809. In 1814 an immense vat burst here, which flooded the immediate neighbourhood in a deluge of liquor. The Horseshoe Hotel can claim fairly ancient descent; it has been in existence as a tavern from 1623. It was called the Horseshoe from the shape of its first dining-room. A Consumption Hospital stands midway between North and South Crescent.
Bedford Square also falls within St. Giles's parish, but it belongs by character and date to Bloomsbury. The Square was erected about the very end of the eighteenth century. Dobie says that "Bedford Square arose from a cow-yard to its present magnificent form ... with its avenues and neighbouring streets ... chiefly erected since 1778," while it appears in a map of 1799 as "St. Giles's Runs." The official residence of the Lord Chancellor was on the east side. Lord Loughborough lived there, and subsequently Lord Eldon, who had to escape with his wife into the British Museum gardens when the mob made an attack on his house during the Corn Law riots.
The streets running north and south are all of the same prosperous, substantial character. About Chenies Street large modern red-brick mansions have arisen.
Woburn Square is a quiet place, with fine trees growing in its pleasant garden. In it is Christ Church, the work of Vulliamy, date 1833. It is of Gothic architecture, and is prettily finished with buttresses and pinnacles, in spite of the ugly material used—namely, white brick. It was at first designed to call the Square Rothesay Square, but it was eventually named Woburn, after the seat of the Duke of Bedford.
Great Coram Street was, of course, named after the genial founder of the Foundling Hospital. In it is the Russell Institution, built at the beginning of the century as an assembly-room, and later used as institute and club. It was frequently visited by Dickens, Leech, and Thackeray, the last named of whom came here in 1837, and remained until 1843, when the house had to be given up owing to the incurable nature of his wife's mental malady. He wrote here many papers and articles, including the famous "Yellow-plush Papers," which appeared in Fraser's Magazine; but his novels belong to a later period.
We have now wandered over a district rich in association, containing some of the oldest domestic architecture existing in London, but which, taken as a whole, is chiefly of a date belonging to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—a date when ladies wore powder and patches, when sedan-chairs were more common than hackney cabs, and when the voice of the link-boy was heard in the streets.