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  UCL BLOOMSBURY PROJECT

 

Bloomsbury Project

Bloomsbury Streets, Squares, and Buildings

Fitzroy (Duke of Grafton) Estate


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

 


Tottenham Place

Also known as Upper Tottenham Place

This short street ran east from Tottenham Court Road between Euston Road and Grafton Street, in the north-west of Bloomsbury

Its site is now the east–west portion of the modern Beaumont Place, not to be confused with the original, now-vanished Beaumont Place

On Horwood’s maps of 1813 and 1819, its eastern end is shown as Upper Tottenham Place

It seems to have been developed by 1795, as it appears on Cary’s map of that date

Horwood’s maps show the following numbering system: on the north side, odd numbers from 1 to 9, running from east to west; and on the south side, even numbers from 4 to 8, running from west to east

It seems to have been a respectable address in the early nineteenth century

No. 25 was the home of piano-maker Thomas Barratt and his wife Emma (née Price); their son Thomas James Barratt, soapmaker and pioneer of Pears advertising, was born there in 1841 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

In the twentieth century it disappeared under the east–west portion of the modern Beaumont Place

This page last modified 14 April, 2011 by Deborah Colville

 

Bloomsbury Project - University College London - Gower Street - London - WC1E 6BT - Telephone: +44 (0)20 7679 3134 - Copyright © 1999-2005 UCL


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