No. 30 Soho Square: The Hospital for Women
In January 1679/80 Richard Frith and William Pym leased this house at the east corner of
Frith Street and Soho Square to Cadogan Thomas
of Lambeth, timber merchant, for a term of fifty
years from Lady Day 1680. The rent was a
peppercorn for the first year, being 'the time allowed for the finishing and improveing' the
house, and £20 per annum thereafter. There was
also a rent of ten shillings a year 'towards the
making and keeping in repaire the Rayles,
Payles, Fountaine and Garden in the middle of
the said Square'. Included in the lease were a
range of stables and back premises behind the
house and fronting on to the east side of Frith
Street. (ref. 3)
Cadogan Thomas did not at once complete the
building work on the house, probably through
lack of funds. By August 1685 he had agreed
with Sir Samuel Grimston, third baronet, a
Hertfordshire landowner and M.P., for the
latter to take a three-year lease of the property
from the following Michaelmas, on the understanding that Thomas completed the house by
that date. Grimston further agreed to pay
Thomas £400 at once towards the cost of this
work and that this sum was to be allowed him
out of the annual rent of the house, which was
£300. (ref. 284)
By 1685 Cadogan Thomas's credit had become
'much impaired' and no building tradesman would
work for him. A group of tradesmen therefore
entered into a direct engagement with Sir Samuel
Grimston and finished the house for him at a total
cost of £448. (ref. 284)
(fn. a) The new house was complete
and occupied by 21 March 1685/6 when Sir
Samuel Grimston entertained the Bishop of
London (Henry Compton) to dinner there, between the two parts of the ceremony of consecrating the newly finished St. Anne's Church. (ref. 285)
The completion of the house did not, however,
prove a profitable undertaking for the building
tradesmen. By December 1692 they had still
only been paid £212 out of the £448 due to
them and were forced to initiate proceedings in
the Court of Chancery to recover the remainder.
The cause of their misfortune was the conflicting
claims of both Sir Samuel Grimston and of the
administrator of the insolvent estate of the nowdeceased Cadogan Thomas to the house. (ref. 284)
Sir Samuel Grimston remained in the house
until 1695, when he moved to another house
in the square. Other occupants include Charles
Bennet, Lord Ossulston, later first Earl of
Tankerville, who was living here in 1703 and
later at No. 27; Daniel Finch, second Earl of
Nottingham and later seventh Earl of Winchilsea, politician, c. 1706, and Sir Cecil Bishopp. (fn. 33)
From 1709 to about 1727 No. 30 was divided
into two dwellings but by 1730 had been
partially rebuilt as one house by Joel Johnson of
St. Marylebone, bricklayer. (ref. 286) At the same time
the stables and back premises of the original house
were demolished for the erection of four new
houses in Frith Street (see page 153). No. 30
must have been greatly improved, for the succeeding occupants include William Fitzroy, third
Duke of Cleveland, 1734–9, Robert Montagu,
third Duke of Manchester, 1741–4, and Constantine Phipps, second Baron Mulgrave, 1782–3.
Later occupants include Charles Alexander
Crickitt, Essex banker, landowner and M.P.,
1787–1800, and Messrs. Wurtz and Richter,
booksellers, 1813–37. In the later eighteenth
and during the first half of the nineteenth century,
No. 30 was intermittently occupied as two separate
dwellings. (ref. 33)
In 1851 No. 30 Soho Square was taken over
by the Hospital for Women, which had been
founded in April 1843 in Red Lion Square,
largely through the efforts of Dr. Protheroe
Smith. 'It was the first Institution established
in this or any other country exclusively for the
treatment of those maladies which neither rank,
wealth, nor character can avert from the female
sex.' The hospital soon outgrew its original
quarters in Red Lion Square and was installed in
more spacious premises at No. 30 Soho Square by
March 1852.<The conversion of No. 30 and No. 1 Frith Street into the Hospital was carried out by Peter Thompson.> It then contained twenty beds but
these had been increased to fifty by 1862. (ref. 287)
In 1865 the freehold of the adjoining house at
No. 29 was purchased from the Crown by the
hospital for £2,540. (ref. 282) In 1867–9 this house
was rebuilt in red brick with two extra storeys,
to provide accommodation for paying patients.
The architect employed was E. L. Bracebridge. (ref. 288)
In 1882 No. 2 Frith Street was acquired and in
1894 was rebuilt as part of the hospital to provide
an outpatients department and dormitories for
nurses, at a cost of £8,000. (ref. 289)
In 1904 the suggestion was made, in the report
of the King Edward's Hospital Fund for London,
that the Women's Hospital in Soho Square should
be removed from the centre of London. The
hospital committee, after considering several
alternative sites, decided that none compared
favourably with the present position. They did,
however, instruct their architect, H. Percy
Adams, to prepare plans for a new building on
their existing site. The plans which Adams submitted in the following year were for a new building providing thirty more beds at an estimated
cost of £40,000. (ref. 290)
This scheme was not carried out owing to
lack of money and in February 1908 new and less
ambitious plans were submitted by Adams to the
hospital committee. These involved the internal
remodelling and modernization of the existing
building (Nos. 29 and 30) and the encasement of
the exterior by the present façade. Work on this
scheme started in March 1909 and was complete
in about a year. At the same time the adjoining
two houses in Frith Street (Nos. 3 and 4) were
incorporated into the hospital building. The
estimated cost of these improvements was
£20,500, much of this sum being provided by
King Edward's Hospital Fund for London. (ref. 291)
Despite the refacing in stucco and faience the
hospital still preserves the appearance of two
separate buildings, No. 29 being three windows
wide and five storeys high, and No. 30 having
a width of four windows and its top storey in a
mansard roof (Plate 71c). No vestige of old work
remains in No. 30, other than the general proportions of the front.