Estates in Bloomsbury

1 Duke of Bedford
2 City of London Corporation
3 Capper Mortimer
4 Fitzroy (Duke of Grafton)
5 Somers
6 Skinners' (Tonbridge)
7 Battle Bridge
8 Lucas
9 Harrison
10 Foundling Hospital
11 Rugby
12 Bedford Charity (Harpur)
13 Doughty
14 Gray's Inn
15 Bainbridge–Dyott (Rookeries)

Area between the Foundling and Harrison estates: Church land

Grey areas: fragmented ownership and haphazard development; already built up by 1800

About the Fitzroy (Duke of Grafton) Estate (also known as the Southampton Estate)

The north-west corner of Bloomsbury lies within what was originally Home Field, part of the manor of Tottenhall, owned from the seventeenth century by the Fitzroy family (Survey of London, vol. 21, 1949)

The names of the estate and many of its streets come from the name of family and its titles: Henry Fitzroy, an illegitimate son of Charles II, was created Earl of Euston and later Duke of Grafton in the seventeenth century, and his descendant Charles Fitzroy became first Baron Southampton in the eighteenth century (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

The estate has no connection with the former Southampton estate in the south of Bloomsbury which belonged to the earlier Earls of Southampton and was acquired by the Dukes of Bedford when this Southampton title became extinct

The Bloomsbury part of the Fitzroy estate was developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century

Most of its streets have disappeared entirely under twentieth-century redevelopment, but one of its names, Euston, was the name chosen for the entirety of the Bloomsbury portion of the New Road in 1857, as well as the name given to the first of the three major mainline railway termini built along the road

 

Grafton Street

Also known as Grafton Street East/Grafton Way

It is in the west of Bloomsbury, running east from Tottenham Court Road to Gower Street, on what was presumably the southern edge of the Fitzroy (Duke of Grafton) estate

It was developed later than the part west of Tottenham Court Road, which was the original Grafton Street, hence its original name (Survey of London, vol. 21, 1949)

It appears on Cruchley’s map of 1827 and Weller’s map of 1868 as Grafton Street East

Dr Williams’s Library was here from 1873 to 1890, occupying a new purpose-built location designed by T. Chatfield Clarke; when the Library left in 1890, this was taken over by Maple & Co (Survey of London, vol. 21, 1949)