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

 

Southampton Court

Not to be confused with Southampton Court off the Strand

It was in the north-west of Bloomsbury, just south of and parallel to Euston Road; it ran from Beaumont Place to Gower Street, which it joined through an archway opposite Warren Street

It appears on Horwood’s map of 1807

It was part of the general area apparently known as Tottenham Court in the mid eighteenth century; some of these buildings may have survived into the nineteenth century

Horwood’s map of 1819 shows the buildings on its south side numbered consecutively from 1–13, running from west to east; the buildings on its north side are unnumbered

The 1841 census shows a street teeming with skilled and in-demand workers: stonemasons, marble polishers, french polishers, brass founders, painters, plasterers, a plumber, shoemakers, tailors, cordwainers, wine coopers, hackney carriage drivers, porters, dressmakers, laundresses, a bow and arrow maker, a cutler, a midwife, and enormous numbers of labourers, mainly Irish (there was at least one lodging house, run by an Irish woman, where many of the labourers resided)

It still appears on Stanford’s map of 1862

It no longer exists