Moor Street
In the surviving ratebooks of St. Martin in the
Fields Moor Street first appears by name in 1683,
the ratebook for the previous year being missing.
The street was then probably complete. The
origin of the name is not known.
The diagonal line of this short street was probably determined by the existence of West Street,
affording access to St. Martin's Lane. The
maps of 1585 and 1676 (Plates 1a, 8b) suggest
that there may have been a field-opening approximately at this south-eastern end of Moor Street
before the streets in Soho Fields were laid out.
A building tradesman's name occurring in an
early ratebook is that of Augustine Beare, glazier,
in 1684.
In 1734 all of the south side was rebuilt by
William Dunn of St. James's, carpenter, and
William Lloyd of St. Anne's, bricklayer, who
together took sixty-five-year building leases
from the Portland family. A year or two later
they rebuilt three houses on the north side under a
similar lease. (ref. 41) Their mortgagees included
Francis Jackman of St. James's, timber merchant,
and William Mantle of St. George's, Hanover
Square, plasterer. (ref. 45) In 1738 two more houses
on that side were rebuilt, probably by William
Bignell of St. Anne's, although his lien on the
sites does not seem to have been a building lease. (ref. 41)
Of the present buildings in the street No. 13
is one of those probably built by William Bignell
in 1738. Nos. 10, 11, 14 and 16 are probably
in carcase those built by Dunn and Lloyd.
It may be noted that the Swiss Chapel, listed
in directories in Moor Street in the early nineteenth century, was outside the parish of St.
Anne. It stood back from the north side of that
part of Moor Street which formed, physically,
the southern end of Crown Street, in the parish
of St. Giles in the Fields. Its site now lies in the
northern angle of Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue.
The surviving original houses in Moor Street
have plain fronts varying in height from three to
four storeys, and two to three windows in width,
and little of interest survives either in exteriors
or interiors. The only exception to this generalization is No. 13, which is noteworthy for the well-restored shop front that projects from the ground
storey of its plain, stock-brick front (Plate 134b).
Simple and elegant in design, and of early nineteenth-century character, this shop front is
divided by slender, plain pilasters into three bays,
narrow between wide. Each side bay contains a
small-paned display window with a segmental
fanlight of radial pattern above the reeded transom, and the narrow doorway was originally
similar. The fascia extending across the shop
front is shaped to a concave profile at each end,
to allow the mutule cornice to be returned against
the front wall of the house. The house entrance,
on the right of the shop front, has a six-panelled
door of early eighteenth-century character,
flanked by slender pilasters with panelled shafts
that support a recessed continuation of the shop-front entablature. The stallboards below the
shop windows, with lattice grilles set in segmental
arches, are modern replacements.
No. 12 Moor Street
This building was erected, like Nos. 1–3
Old Compton Street and No. 99A Charing Cross
Road, to a design of 1904 by Charles H. Worley, (ref. 46)
and was first assessed for rates in 1910. It is one
of the livelier features in an architecturally unexciting area. Designed in a Baroque manner, it
has nevertheless something of the lightness and
fantasy of the Art Nouveau. It contains three
storeys and a garret, and has fronts to Moor
Street and Old Compton Street faced with stone
and dark green glazed brick. The ground storey is
conventional enough with wide display windows
flanked by rusticated pilasters, these supporting
an entablature with tall frieze and moulded
cornice. In the second storey, however, are great
semi-circular windows with rusticated architraves,
the alternate voussoirs emphasized and those at
the top fantastically lengthened to touch the
window sills of the storey above. The third
storey has the more conventional oblong windows,
but with architraves similar to those in the second
storey and with very deep, continued sills. The
fronts are finished with a modillioned cornice and
a parapet in which the coping is dropped at intervals in a deep, semi-circular curve. The awkward
triangular shape of the site provides the opportunity for a dramatic feature at its flattened apex,
looking west down Old Compton Street. There
the second and third storeys are emphasized by
rusticated flanking pilasters set at an angle, and
above the main cornice is a dormer gable with
rusticated columns, also angled, at either side,
and finished with a segmental pediment.
The very similar building by the same architect, Nos. 1–3 Old Compton Street and No. 99A
Charing Cross Road, is at the other end of the
block but there is no evidence that it was ever
intended to link the two in a single scheme.