Marylebone - Streets

Streets

Mansfield Street is a short continuation of Chandos Street built by the Adam brothers in 1770, on a plot of ground which had been underwater. Most of its houses are fine buildings with exquisite interiors, when put on the market now will have a price tag in excess of £10 million. It has attracted people who understand attractive buildings – at Number 13 lived religious architect John Loughborough Pearson who died in 1897, and Drogo & Delhi designer Sir Edwin Lutyens, who died in 1944. Immediately across the road at 61 New Cavendish Street lived Natural History Museum creator Alfred Waterhouse.

Queen Anne Street is an elegant cross-street which unites the northern end of Chandos Street with Welbeck Street. The painter JMW Turner moved to 47 Queen Anne Street in 1812 from 64 Harley Street, now divided into numbers 22 and 23, and owned the house until his death in 1851. It was known as "Turner's Den", becoming damp, dilapidated, dusty, dirty, with dozens of Turner's works of art now in the National Gallery scattered throughout the house, walls covered in tack holes and a drawing room peopled by cats with no tails.

During the same period a few hundred yards to the east, Chandos House in Chandos Street was used as the Austro-Hungarian Embassy and residence of the fabulously extravagant Ambassador Prince Paul Anton III Esterhazy, seeing entertainment on a most lavish scale. The building is one of the finest surviving Adam houses in London, and now lets rooms.

Wimpole Street runs from Henrietta Place north to Devonshire Street, becoming Upper Wimpole en route – the latter where Arthur Conan Doyle opened his ophthalmic practice at number 2 in 1891. A six-floor, Grade II 18th-century house at 57 Wimpole Street is where Paul McCartney resided from 1964–66, staying on the top floor of girlfriend Jane Asher’s family home in a room overlooking Browning Mews in the back, and with John Lennon writing I Want to Hold Your Hand on a piano in the basement. At her father's house at number 50 lived for some time between 1840 and 1845, Miss Elizabeth Barrett, then known as the author of a volume of poems, and who afterwards escaped and was better known as Mrs. E. Browning. Today, at the bottom end of Wimpole at Wigmore can be found a sandwich shop named "Barrett's".

Bentinck Street leaves Welbeck Street and touches the middle of winding Marylebone Lane. Charles Dickens lived at number 18 with his indebted father (aka Wilkins Micawber) while working as a court reporter in the 1830s, and Edward Gibbon wrote much of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire while living at number 7 from the early 1770s. James Smithson wrote the will that led to the foundation of the Smithsonian Institution while living at number 9 in 1826, while number 10 was briefly graced by Chopin in 1848, who found his apartment too expensive and moved to Mayfair. More recently, Cambridge Spies Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess shared a flat at an unrecorded Bentinck Street address during the Second World War, as did Swinging Sixties two-some John Dunbar and TV repairman “Magic Alex”, where the former introduced the latter to John Lennon in 1967.

Manchester Square, west of Bentinck street, has a central private garden with handsome plane trees, laid out in 1776. The mansion on the north side of the Square, now the home of the Wallace Collection that features world-class French eighteenth-century painting, porcelains and furniture, once housed the Spanish ambassador, whose chapel was in Spanish Place. From the north-west corner is Manchester Street, final home of Georgian-era prophet Joanna Southcott, who died there in 1814, having attracted a jeering mob with report of a miraculous birth and prediction the Day of Judgement would arrive in the year 2004.

Marylebone has some “Beatles” heritage, with a Ringo Starr flat at 34 Montagu Square, and the original Apple Corps HQ at 95 Wigmore Street.

Welbeck Street at the intersection of a right turn onto Bentinck Street was the location of a near-fatal traffic accident for Sherlock Holmes in The Final Problem, soon followed by a narrow escape from a falling brick in Vere Street – Professor Moriarty's work, most likely.

Bulstrode Street, small and charming, is named for a Portman family estate in Buckinghamshire, itself named after a local family there made-good in Tudor days. Tucked away, with a few terraced houses, Bulstrode has been the home of minor health care professionals for hundreds of years. RADA student and aspiring actress Vivien Leigh, aged twenty in 1933, gave birth at the Rahere Nursing Home, then at number 8, to her first child. Also, a small tubercular patch in her lungs was discovered.

The north end of Welbeck joins New Cavendish Street, the name changed from Upper Marylebone Street in the late nineteenth century. At a house across New Cavendish from its join with Welbeck, that stood at number 13 on the corner of Marylebone Street, was born in 1882 Leopold Stokowski, son of a Polish cabinet maker. Young Stokowski sang in the choir of St Marylebone Church.

Walking north on Marylebone High Street towards the Marylebone Road reaches an area with a colourful history, which includes the former Marylebone Gardens, whose entertainments including bare-knuckle fighting, a cemetery, a workhouse, and the areas frequented by Charles Wesley, all shut down by the close of the 18th century, where today we find mansion blocks and upper-end retail. At their rented flat at number 100 in the High Street, Cliff Richard, Hank Marvin and Bruce Welch gazed at one of the UK's first Fender Stratocasters in 1959.

At Number 1 Dorset Street resided mid-Victorian scientist Charles Babbage, inventor of the Analytical Engine. Babbage complained that two adjacent hackney-coach stands in Paddington Street ruined the neighbourhood, leading to the establishment of coffee and beer shops, and furthermore, the character of the new population could be inferred from the taste they exhibited for the noisiest and most discordant music. As if in response, a venue for chamber music, the Wigmore Hall, opened at 36 Wigmore Street in 1901. It hosts over 400 events each year.