CHAPTER XI
Upper Brook Street
All of the land in Upper Brook Street was developed under
only four building agreements, each of which comprised a
substantial block of land. The first of them was signed in
1721 and the other three in 1725, and the ensuing building
leases of all the plots in the street (at first called Brook
Street but by the 1740's known by its present name) were
granted between 1728 and 1736. By 1734 almost all the
houses east of Park Street had been built and occupied, but
progress was much slower further west, only nine of the
houses there being occupied by 1740, while those built on
the shallow plots at the western extremity of the south side
were not all completed and occupied until 1759. The
pattern of development here was, in fact, substantially
different from that to the east in Brook Street and
Grosvenor Street, where many of the building agreements
had comprised only two or three individual house plots
and where most of the houses had been built and occupied
as early as 1729.
In 1760, the year after the last house had been taken,
there were fourteen titled inhabitants in the fifty-seven
rated houses—a substantially smaller proportion than in
Grosvenor Street, but greater than in Brook Street. Half of
these titled residents were women, and in the whole street
there were no less than twenty-six female householders. It
was perhaps owing to this strong feminine presence here
that houses were often to be had on lease for short-term
occupation, as Lady Burgoyne, newly arrived in town in
November 1752 and 'still sur le Pavé', described in a letter
to the Earl of Guilford. 'We intend going into a Lodging
House we have hired ready furnished in Upper Brook
Street; it is a most shabby business as all these Lodging
Houses are, but nevertheless extreamly expensive'; and
three weeks later these fears were confirmed when the
house proved to be 'a most horrid Place, … so excessively
small that I am at a loss where to put my Boy when he
comes hitherto'. (ref. 1)
Unlike Brook Street and Grosvenor Street, Upper
Brook Street was not subject to commercial pressure from
the east, outside the estate, and although the first
inhabitants had included at least five tradesmen (all at or
adjoining confined corner sites), their number had not
increased by 1792, when the names of all but six of the
householders in the street were listed in the court guide. (ref. 2)
Upper Brook Street was, moreover, one of the streets to
which the Grosvenor Board's new policy, introduced at
about this time in the renewal of leases, of banning taverns,
shops and 'any Art, Trade or Manufactory whatsoever',
was most strictly applied; and by about 1835, when all the
original leases had been renewed, the effect of this policy
seems to have been (again unlike in Brook Street and
Grosvenor Street) to rid Upper Brook Street of virtually
all trade. (ref. 3) Residential purity as absolute as that of
Grosvenor Square itself had, in fact, been achieved; and it
was to be maintained virtually unimpaired until after 1939,
diluted only by a growing number of doctors who no doubt
combined professional with domestic use, and (after 1918)
by one or two foreign legations.
The original house plots in the street varied considerably in size, having frontages ranging from fifteen to
fifty-one feet; and there was even greater variation in their
depth, those at or near the corners being in general shallow
and having much smaller houses built upon them than in
the main ranges of the street. Most of the original houses
evidently had three main storeys over a basement and
garrets, and although many of them have been altered
almost beyond recognition, over twenty of them survive in
some form. Nos. 20, 23 and 36 still have original internal
features.
Alterations made in late-Georgian times may still be
seen, the fanlight at No. 21 and the lengthened first-floor
windows and projecting iron balcony at Nos. 35 and 36
(externally the best preserved houses in the street) being
good examples (Plate 54a). No. 33 was transformed
externally and internally by Robert Taylor in 1767–8,
within little more than a decade of its first erection, and
although subsequently much altered is still an important
house (Plate 57). So too, until its demolition in c. 1935, was
No. 6, built in 1732–3 by Edward Shepherd, seemingly
with a stone or stucco front and a pediment, and lavishly
reconstructed internally by Samuel Wyatt in 1787–8 (Plate
56).
More arresting external changes began during the reign
of the second Marquess of Westminster from 1845 to 1869.
His usual leasing policy here and in other comparable parts
of the estate (e.g. Brook Street, Grosvenor Street, Upper
Grosvenor Street and Grosvenor Square) was to grant
short renewals of varying lengths arranged so that the
leases of groups or ranges of houses would all in due course
expire at the same time, thereby permitting the simultaneous rebuilding of adjacent houses. In the meantime,
however, external changes could be required as a condition
of renewal, and projecting porches, first-floor balustrades
and window dressings, all in stucco, became the usual but
not invariable order of the day, the designs often provided
by the estate surveyor, Thomas Cundy II. Nos. 4, 19, 20,
23 and 24 all display variations of this treatment, which
was often accompanied at or about the same time by the
conversion of the original garrets into square attic storeys
with another storey on top. No. 11, which also exhibits the
Cundy recipe, is a complete rebuilding of 1852–3,
probably designed by Henry Harrison.
But the second Marquess's successor, latterly the first
Duke, directed his formidable rebuilding energies from
1869 to 1899 upon other less well-maintained parts of the
estate, and, most exceptionally, Upper Brook Street
contains no trace whatsoever of his very different taste.
The field here was therefore clear for his grandson, the
second Duke, under whom about one third of all the
buildings in the street were rebuilt. Much of this work took
place between 1905 and 1915, when fourteen houses were
rebuilt, all except one (No. 54, by Ernest George, now
demolished, Plate 55b) having the stone fronts then
favoured by the Estate. Six of these (Nos. 1, 2, 16, 17, 18
and 39) were designed by Edmund Wimperis (sometimes
with other members of his firm), who became the estate
surveyor in 1910, and who after the war of 1914–18 was the
architect of two more houses (Nos. 9 and 10) and of three
blocks of flats, two of the latter being at corner sites and
having their principal fronts to Park Street. Even after the
lapse of more than forty years since his last work here,
Upper Brook Street is still dominated by Wimperis's
opulent manner, ranging from the pre-war Tudor of No. 1
(now altered) and the Beaux Arts of No. 2 to the inter-war
red-brick and stone neo-Georgian of Nos. 9 and 10 or the
chunky blocks of flats at Upper Feilde and Upper Brook
Feilde (Plate 31a: see also Plates 44b, 49a, 49b in vol. XXXIX).
Many of these newcomers, and also many of the older
houses in the street, were lavishly embellished internally,
£20,000 being spent, for instance, by the tenant of No. 19
in 1903–4, with W. H. Romaine-Walker and Besant as his
architects.
Much of this work was in the French taste, usually in the
first-floor drawing-rooms, while neo-Georgian or Adam
was popular downstairs.
During the last forty years the outward appearance of
Upper Brook Street has changed very little, apart from the
demolition of Nos. 54–56 in c. 1957 for the building of the
American Embassy in Grosvenor Square; but there have
been very great changes in the use of the buildings. Private
residents, still overwhelmingly predominant in 1939, have
largely given place (except in the blocks of flats) to offices,
mostly used either by commercial companies, or by a
variety of boards and associations, or by the professions,
the doctors in this last category being less numerous than
in the 1920's and 30's. In 1970 foreign diplomatic missions
occupied five houses here.