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 Bainbridge and Dyott Estates and the Rookeries

Thomas Beames, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, described the whole area of St Giles as the type of “the lowest conditions under which human life is possible”, but he was at a loss to explain why: it was not on the river (at that time a haunt of criminals), had not had sanctuary areas (which often became criminal rendezvous places) and had been a rich area in the seventeenth century (Thomas Beames, The Rookeries of London: Past, Present, and Prospective, 2nd edn, 1852)

Beames further notes that “Bainbridge and Buckeridge Street were built prior to 1672, and derive their names from their owners, who were men of wealth in the time of Charles II.; as Dyott Street does its title from Mr. Dyott, a man of consideration in the same reign” (Thomas Beames, The Rookeries of London: Past, Present, and Prospective, 2nd edn, 1852)

By the 1740s, however, the area had become the slum known as the Rookeries, inhabited by many poor Irish in particular, and with a reputation for crime as well as poverty (Thomas Beames, The Rookeries of London: Past, Present, and Prospective, 2nd edn, 1852)

“The worst sink of iniquity was The Rookery,–-a place or rather district, so named, whose shape was triangular, bounded by Bainbridge Street, George Street, and High Street, St Giles’s. While the New Oxford Street was building, the recesses of this Alsatia were laid open partially to the public, the debris were exposed to view; the colony, called The Rookery was like an honeycomb, perforated by a number of courts and blind alleys, culs de sac, without any outlet other than the entrance” (Thomas Beames, The Rookeries of London: Past, Present, and Prospective, 2nd edn, 1852)

A similar account of the maze of alleyways and building appears in Henry Mayhew’s account of his visit to the Rookery of St Giles in about 1860, in which he quotes from a manuscript by Mr Hunt, inspector of local lodging-houses, concerning the conditions in the area prior to the development of New Oxford Street through it in the 1840s (Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, ed Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, 2010)

According to this, “The ground covered by the Rookery was enclosed by Great Russell Street, Charlotte Street, Broad Street, and High Street, all within the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. Within this space were George Street (once Dyott Street), Carrier Street, Maynard Street, and Church Street, which ran from north to south, and were intersected by Church Lane, Ivy Lane, Buckeridge Street, Bainbridge Street, and New Street. These, with an almost endless intricacy of courts and yards crossing each other, rendered the place like a rabbit-warren...Both sides of Buckeridge Street abounded in courts, particularly the north side, and these, with the connected backyards and low walls in the rear of the street, afforded an easy escape to any thief when pursued by officers of justice” (Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, ed Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, 2010)

Beames in his account mentioned the original wealthy landowners of Bainbridge, Buckeridge, and Dyott; at the beginning of the nineteenth century, much of the area was still covered by the Bainbridge and Dyott estates, the latter of which was owned by a Thomas Skip Dyot Bucknall, so evidently two of the families were interconnected (ACC/1852/003, London Metropolitan Archives)

Bucknall died in 1797, leaving four children, all daughters; his will settled his estate on his eldest daughter, Arabella Charlotte Dyot Bucknall, and her heirs male (ACC/1852/003, London Metropolitan Archives)

If all his daughters died without male issue, the estate was entailed on “the heirs male of Richard Dyot of Freeford in the county of Stafford Esquire” so that “the said Dyot Estates and Property as before described, are not to be any ways divided or sold, but constantly held and enjoyed by a Dyot, the heir male of the said Richard Dyot for ever” (ACC/1852/003, London Metropolitan Archives)

Arabella Dyot Bucknall attained her majority and married Thomas Hanmer in 1808; in 1815 they and other surviving members of the family succeeded in getting royal assent to an Act of Parliament designed to allow them to sell off the estate and use the money raised from the sale to buy land elsewhere which would be inherited according to the terms of Thomas Skip Dyot Bucknall’s will (ACC/1852/003, London Metropolitan Archives)

The Act said that “the said Estate called the Dyot Estate, consists entirely of houses and buildings, situated in the parishes of Saint Giles in the Fields and Saint George Bloomsbury in the county of Middlesex, and Crucifix Lane Bermondsey in the county of Surrey, which are for the most part poor and mean, and many of them are in a very decayed state; so that great sums of money are or will be required to be laid out upon them to prevent their falling into ruin, and the same are liable to great hazard of loss or damage by fire and otherwise” (ACC/1852/003, London Metropolitan Archives)

The estate was said at the time to be going to be settled on Charles Cecil Cope Jenkinson and John Harding and their heirs (ACC/1852/003, London Metropolitan Archives)

A schedule gives a listing of the property included within the estate, comprising nos 1–41 Dyot Street, Dyot Garden, nos 1–15 Church Lane, Winkworth Yard, Robinhood Court, Nicholas Court, Buckley Court, Whitehorse Yard, and parts of Phoenix Street, High Street, and Broad Street (ACC/1852/003, London Metropolitan Archives)

A further related document shows the estate as surveyed on 12 February 1851, prior to its being auctioned on 19 March 1851; it seems to occupy the same area as specified in the schedule, and shows the locations of some (but not all) of the tiny courts and yards named on that schedule (ACC/1852/007, London Metropolitan Archives)

Another plan (undated, but made after the construction of New Oxford Street in the 1840s and probably dating from the 1870s) describes the estate as “Lord Hanmer’s estate”, suggesting that the Dyot Bucknall family had not, after all, sold the land (ACC/1852/009, London Metropolitan Archives), while a further plan dated 1876 shows the combined estates of Dyott and Buckeridge, the property of John, Baron Hanmer (ACC/1852/010, London Metropolitan Archives)

The owner of the estate named on these plans is John, eldest son of Arabella (née Dyot Bucknall) and her husband Thomas Hanmer, a poet and politician, who was 3rd Baronet Hanmer from 1828 and 1st Baron Hanmer from 1872 until his death in 1881 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

The Buckeridge estate as shown jointly with the Dyott estate on this plan was much smaller, including houses along the north side of Church Lane between Church Street and George Street, and some houses on what was left of Carrier Street (ACC/1852/010, London Metropolitan Archives)

Although the whole area was affected by the construction of New Oxford Street in the 1840s, many of its streets survived this development and became even poorer and more crowded than before, as residents displaced by the development crowded into the remaining streets, courts, and alleys (Journal of the Statistical Society of London, vol. XI, March 1848)

In 1874 the area was still desperately in need of improvement, being still overcrowded and unhealthy; The Times reported that the Metropolitan Board of Works had obtained orders for the demolition of buildings in the yards of houses on the north and south sides of Church Lane, Carrier Street, and Church Street, along with the demolition in their entirety of Welch’s Court and Kennedy Court (The Times, 27 August 1874)

Throughout the twentieth century there was more redevelopment in the area, and in the early twenty-first century the 500,000 sq. ft Central Saint Giles project became the latest attempt to sweep away all the old buildings on the site and replace them with a modern and progressive urban environment (www.centralsaintgiles.com)

Church Lane and Church Street

Not to be confused with the many other streets of the same names in London

These two streets were in the south-west of Bloomsbury, in the Rookeries south of Great Russell Street; they are impossible to separate because each was known as both Church Lane and Church Street throughout the nineteenth century

One street ran south from Bainbridge Street past Buckridge Street, and joined the other street, which ran sharply east to join Dyott Street opposite Phoenix Street

Cary’s 1795 map shows a southern, rather crooked, continuation from the sharp turn, running south as far as Broad Street; it seems likely this was actually an ad hoc way through via the old Banister’s Alley, which was marked on Rocque’s 1746 map but which seems to have degenerated into a couple of narrow footpaths by the time of Horwood’s 1799 map

No later maps show this way through

Maps and other topographical sources remain divided throughout the century about which street had which name

Most major maps, including Wallis (1801), Cary (1837), Stanford (1862), and Weller 1868) follow the 1720 parish map and Rocque (1746) in showing Church Lane running from north to south, and Church Street running from east to west; Cruchley (1827) shows only the latter, with the north–south part not named at all

However, the usually more reliable Horwood (1799 and 1819) and Ordnance Survey (1867–1870) maps show Church Street running from north to south and Church Lane running from east to west, as also described by Lockie (1810) and Elmes (1831) in their Topographies, and Mr Hunt, inspector of lodging-houses, in his account of the area quoted in Henry Mayhew, ‘A Visit to the Rookery of St Giles and its Neighbourhood,’ London Labour and the London Poor, ed Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (2010)

The land seems to have been developed for residential purposes in the seventeenth century (Survey of London, vol. 5, 1914)

It was developed on land which had been part of St Giles Hospital (Survey of London, vol. 5, 1914)

Part of the land on which the street was built was known as Church Close (Survey of London, vol. 5, 1914)

No numbers appear on either street on Horwood’s maps

Strype describes both as “but ordinary” (John Strype, Stow’s Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, Corrected, Improved and Very Much Enlarged, 1720)

In the early nineteenth century it was part of the slum of the Rookeries

In the 1840s the development of New Oxford Street (begun 1844; opened 1847) cut through its northernmost part

This inevitably led to even more overcrowding and disease in the streets which remained, exacerbated by the Irish famines of 1846 and 1847 which brought yet more Irish people to this and other areas of London

In 1841 the census showed Church Lane to have 27 houses (as they both had about the same, it is not clear which street is meant here) with 655 inhabitants, or an average of 24 per house, with as many as 49 and 42 inhabitants at nos 23 and 24 respectively, and 39 at no. 1 (Horace Mann, ‘Statement of the Mortality Prevailing in Church Lane During the Last Ten Years, with the Sickness During the Last Seven Months; Contained in a Letter Addressed to Dr Guy’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, vol. 11, no. 1, March 1848)

By 1847, if the 12 houses in the street investigated by the Statistical Society could be considered representative, the average population in the street would have risen from 24 to more than 40 (Horace Mann, ‘Statement of the Mortality Prevailing in Church Lane During the Last Ten Years, with the Sickness During the Last Seven Months; Contained in a Letter Addressed to Dr Guy’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, vol. 11, no. 1, March 1848)

The overall mortality rate in St Giles was reported to be 2.69% in the period 1838–1844; Horace Mann was interested in how this broke down across the different age groups, and calculated that over 30% of infants under the age of 1 died in Church Lane, and more than 45% of those still living at 1 would die before they reached the age of 2—these figures being rather worse than the averages for the same age groups across St Giles as a whole (Horace Mann, ‘Statement of the Mortality Prevailing in Church Lane During the Last Ten Years, with the Sickness During the Last Seven Months; Contained in a Letter Addressed to Dr Guy’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, vol. 11, no. 1, March 1848)

Things were supposedly improving by 1852, when the Registrar of North St Giles reported that enforcing sanitary regulations and limiting the number of inhabitants in the lodging-houses of Church Lane and the Rookeries generally had led to a 20% decrease in the number of deaths there (The Times, 30 July 1852)

In about 1860 Henry Mayhew visited what was left of the streets in the company of a police inspector; he described its three-storey houses as picturesquely crowded with poor but cheerful working people, many of them Irish (Henry Mayhew, ‘A Visit to the Rookery of St Giles and its Neighbourhood,’ London Labour and the London Poor, ed Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, 2010)

There were also, however, lodging-houses occupied by itinerant workers, and several brothels (Henry Mayhew, ‘A Visit to the Rookery of St Giles and its Neighbourhood,’ London Labour and the London Poor, ed Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, 2010)

A 22-year old costermonger, John Bryant, of 8 Church Lane, was one of the victims of the Regent’s Park ice tragedy in 1867; his body was identified by his brother (The Times, 17 January 1867)

In 1874 the area was still desperately in need of improvement, being still overcrowded and unhealthy; The Times reported that the Metropolitan Board of Works had obtained orders for the demolition of buildings in the yards of houses on the north and south sides of Church Lane, Carrier Street, and Church Street, along with the demolition in their entirety of Welch’s Court and Kennedy Court (The Times, 27 August 1874)

In the twentieth century, all remaining traces of it were obliterated by redevelopment