Mount Street / History

A history of Mount Street

A Georgian street of tradesmen and a parish workhouse, rebuilt by the Grosvenor estate in the 1880s and 1890s as a row of shops with flats above.

The name

Mount Street takes its name from Mount Field, which held a small earthwork known as Oliver's Mount. It was said to be left over from the fortifications thrown up around London during the English Civil War. By the eighteenth century it was probably little more than a raised bank, and building over the field erased it. When development started, the new houses were simply called "the new buildings about Oliver's Mount". The name also passed to Mount Row and to the Mount Coffee House.

The Georgian street

Building began around 1720 on the Grosvenor family's Mayfair estate and went on for about twenty years. Much of it was done by building tradesmen who also worked elsewhere on the estate. The houses were mostly narrow, three storeys high with garrets, and often had workshops or stables behind. Shops clustered east of South Audley Street; the western end stayed mainly residential.

From the start the street served the grander squares to its north and south rather than competing with them. It never had the fashionable reputation of Bond Street.

The workhouse and the burial ground

In 1723 Sir Richard Grosvenor sold land on the south side to the Commissioners for building fifty new churches. It became a burial ground for St George's, Hanover Square. The parish workhouse went up in front of it in 1725–26, to a plan by Benjamin Timbrell and Thomas Phillips. It was enlarged in 1743 and 1772, and rebuilt in 1786–88 by William Porden, the vestry surveyor. A watch-house for the parish watchmen was added at the west end and was attacked during riots in June 1792.

The burial ground closed in the 1850s, when the Burial Acts shut central London's churchyards. The workhouse stayed until 1886. Its site is now 103 Mount Street, and the burial ground behind it is Mount Street Gardens.

The Duke of Westminster's rebuild, 1880–1900

By the 1870s most of the street's leases were close to expiry. The estate decided that nothing short of complete rebuilding would do. Under Hugh Lupus Grosvenor, the first Duke of Westminster, Mount Street was reconstructed between 1880 and 1900 as ornamental ranges of shops with gentlemen's flats or houses above.

For the early corner block at No. 130 and Berkeley Square, the Duke asked for red brick faced with terracotta or stone, and he favoured the Queen Anne style. Later blocks followed the same pattern:

• Nos. 104–108 (1886–87), by Ernest George and Peto, in Doulton terracotta.
• Nos. 125–129 (1886–87), by W. H. Powell, in yellow brick banded with buff Doulton terracotta.
• Nos. 87–102 (1889–95), by Albert J. Bolton, with elaborate terracotta trimmings to the gables, chimneys and mullions.

Several of these blocks are now Grade II listed. A few earlier buildings survived the rebuild. William Skeat's 1829–32 houses at Nos. 65–67 and 70–71 lasted until they were cleared for Fountain House in 1935–38.

Mount Street today

The Grosvenor estate still owns much of the street and describes its architecture as Queen Anne revival. It remains a street of shops and restaurants with homes above, much as the first Duke intended. For what to look out for on a walk along it, see landmarks on Mount Street.

Next: Mount Street Gardens