CHAPTER XII
Upper Grosvenor Street
Situated between Grosvenor Square and Park Lane and
for many years the address of the Grosvenors' own
London mansion, Upper Grosvenor Street was long one of
the best streets even within Mayfair, although Upper
Brook Street was in some ways closely comparable to it. In
1918, indeed, the Grosvenor Board stated in its minutes
that 'the street was looked upon as one of the finest
residential properties on the estate or in Mayfair'. (ref. 1) The
head of the Grosvenor family himself, however, was
evidently less committed to the conservative implications
of this view, (ref. 2) and in a few years much of the street was
consumed or overshadowed by the present Grosvenor
House.
The extent to which the original fabric of the houses in
the street has survived is not, however, very much less than
in Upper Brook Street. Of the fifty-one houses first built
here, fifteen still exist at least vestigially, and of these
perhaps ten have outwardly something of their original
appearance, either with a later stucco facing or, at six
houses, with substantially the brick fronts that were
originally standard. All have probably been heightened by
a storey or more. At six (Nos. 7, 9, 15, 16, 18, 44) original
internal features are known to have survived. Of the rest,
five, at Nos. 1–5, have disappeared without successors,
where a wide pavement extends before the flank front of
the American Embassy. The outward aspect of the
remainder is notable for the comparatively scanty
representation of the nineteenth century (chiefly to be seen
at Nos. 6, 10, 11, and No. 93 Park Lane), and the
correspondingly extensive show made by refrontings or
rebuildings in this century: apart from the long northern
flank front of Grosvenor House itself, which swallowed up
some dozen house sites in the 1920's, and the return fronts
of other blocks facing Park Street, which account for four
more, there are thirteen house sites which exhibit
twentieth-century fronts. Of these, only four augment
Grosvenor House's contribution of inter-war neo-Georgian, while nine date (like the return fronts of the
Park Street blocks) from the years between 1905 and 1914.
It is perhaps to that period (which also gave a stone front to
the demolished No. 1) that the street owes such distinctive
character as it possesses.
Until the last fifty of its 250 years the history of Upper
Grosvenor Street has been overwhelmingly that of private
houses inhabited by the rich, and this a little more
consistently even than in Upper Brook Street, where a
nearer proximity to the less attractive north-west corner of
the estate cast a doubt over its progress from which Upper
Grosvenor Street was free. The presence from an early
date of the noble and sometime royal mansion, initially
Lord Chetwynd's, which became Grosvenor House seems
to have fortified the firm social tone of this street.
As in Upper Brook Street, however, the prosperous
future was not anticipated to such a degree or in such a way
as to lead to a development that differed (save Lord
Chetwynd's house itself) from the estate's norm. Laid out
under five (or perhaps six) building agreements made in
c. 1724–8, the street was built-up in houses under leases, or
sub-leases, granted between 1727 and 1735 to some
twenty-one building tradesmen who represented all the
main crafts except the smith's and plasterer's. There is no
suggestion in the leasing particulars of a peculiarly grand
clientèle in prospect: as in Upper Brook Street the average
frontage was of twenty-six or twenty-seven feet—about
the same respectable width, that is, as in Grosvenor Street
and Brook Street, and with the same prudently large
variety in the actual width of plots, ranging from sixteen to
forty (or, at No. 32, fifty-seven) feet.
The prudence was probably justified at the time, for the
houses seem to have taken rather longer to dispose of to
their first residents than those in the slightly earlier-developed Grosvenor and Brook Streets. An average of
over three years elapsed between the completion of the
carcases and the first occupation of the houses, which filled
up between 1729 and 1741. But unlike in Upper Brook
Street the completion of the street was not unduly delayed,
and having come the first residents were disposed to stay
for a reasonable length of time. On average (and excluding
two tenants of public houses at the corners of Blackburne's
Mews and Park Lane) they kept their houses for over eight
years.
Three of these first residents were building tradesmen
who had been involved in the creation of the street—Benjamin Timbrell at No. 12, Lawrence Neale at No. 24
and William Hale at No. 26. All were comparatively longterm residents, but it is quite consistent with fashionable
London in the 1730's that the presence of these (no doubt
substantial) master workmen did not deter the aristocracy.
Some fifteen of the first occupants were titled, and ten are
known to have been M.P.'s. Unlike in Upper Brook Street
few were women, and the lodging-house element seems to
have been lacking.
Given the varied width of frontages and the many
builders involved it is not surprising that the first houses,
while generally conforming in their brick fronts to a height
of three storeys above street level plus a garret storey,
differed greatly in their internal arrangement—or so is
suggested by the score or more of surviving plans drawn in
the years around 1800 by the estate surveyor. The types
approximated, however, to those in Upper Brook Street.
As there, a popular plan for the wider sites was that of the
famous house at No. 44 Grosvenor Square with the ground
floor divided by cross walls into four compartments of
about equal size, one of those at the front being devoted to
a spacious entrance-cum-staircase hall, and that behind it
being divided into a secondary staircase compartment and
a small rear room. This type is known to have existed at
Nos. 14, 15, 19, 21 and 39 (and probably also at 18 and 20),
most of them being associated with the carpenter
Lawrence Neale, who is the most frequently encountered
of the builders in Upper Grosvenor Street. Another rather
noticeable type, which existed at Nos. 44, 45, 47 and 48,
and probably 31, gave full-width rooms at front and back.
The extravagance of an entrance compartment occupying
all the front of the ground floor does not, however, seem to
have been exploited, as it might have been by the later
Palladians, to place the front door centrally.
Of the original doorcases only those (of wood) at Nos. 44
(Plate 62d) and 48 appear to survive. The testimony of a
commentator in 1755 is that there were 'hardly two Doors
alike in the whole Street', (ref. 3) in which they seem to have
reflected a general lack of close uniformity between the
houses.
By the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries a
feature which was, again, paralleled in Upper Brook Street
was the ground-floor passage at one side of the garden,
connecting the house with the mews building, particularly
when the builder had contrived the desired location of the
kitchen there. Six of the plans show such a passage and at
least one other house had one.
Apart from the two publicans there is little sign of retail
trade in the street in its early days. In 1790 the
householders in trade numbered three, an apothecary, a
greengrocer, and a licensed victualler, all at the north-east
end, at Nos. 3, 5 and 6. (ref. 4) Two years later all but a few
householders were listed in Boyle's Court Guide, and by
about 1835, as in Upper Brook Street, all the tradesmen
had gone. The Victorian physician or surgeon was less
evident here than in that street; in 1871 there were three, (ref. 5)
but the Marquess of Westminster decided in 1873 that
they should in time go the same way as the tradesmen, and
by the next year only one remained. (ref. 6) The Marquess
himself was seated, as the Grosvenors had been since 1808,
at Grosvenor House, where from 1843 a noble if rather
sombre colonnaded screen (Plate 20c in vol. XXXIX) gave
dignity to the western end of the street, and he and his
successor were to remain there until 1916. The replacement of this great mansion by the present Grosvenor
House in 1927–8 was promptly matched by the appearance
in the street of businesses, which are first shown in the Post
Office Directory, at two sites, in 1928. By 1935 only three of
the nine houses facing Grosvenor House, which had all
been privately occupied in 1927, were still shown in private
hands, and by 1939 only two. In that year, however, the
eastern half of the street, between Park Street and
Grosvenor Square, was still very largely occupied by
private householders, interspersed with flats. Of the five
houses which are listed in the directories as in the hands of
tradesmen (in fact, clothes-makers) all but one were still
confined to the range facing the new Grosvenor House.
Long tenure by the rich meant that this was a street
where alterations made to the houses tended successively
to obliterate each other. Little or nothing is known of
embellishments in the 1760's or 1770's, elsewhere so
productive of 'improvement'. A refronting and interior of
the 1790's partly survives at No. 18, and Soane made
substantial alterations in 1803–4 at the now-demolished
No. 14. The 1820's were an active period here, which saw
seemingly complete rebuildings at Nos. 4–6, 22, 25, 28,
37A and 47, as well as substantial work at Nos. 1, 15, 29 and
46. But of this only that at No. 6 is still visible to the passerby. The stucco-fronted rebuilding of Nos. 10–11 in the
1840's remains. These renovations and renewals made the
street less susceptible to the white brick and Portland
cement so favoured elsewhere by the second Marquess and
Thomas Cundy II in the 1850's and 1860's: of the three orfour refrontings under their aegis only that at No. 15
survives. Nor is the red-brick 'Queen Anne' zeal of the first
Duke better represented. The five houses rebuilt or altered
between 1874 and 1880 have all been rebuilt or refronted in
turn and the one front surviving from his day, No. 16,
stuccoed in 1881, is totally uncharacteristic. Meanwhile
the nineteenth century generally saw the houses heightened by a storey or two and built out at the back—often
for a new dining-room or billiard-room, occasionally
supplemented in this century by the more energetic
racquets court.
The uncharacteristic stucco of No. 16, whatever its
explanation, went on to survive the most important
development under the second Duke—the almost complete replacement, soon after he succeeded to the title in
1899, of the existing fronts of houses on the north side of
the street facing Grosvenor House (Plate 60a). At No. 23
an existing brick front was stuccoed in 1901–2 and another
existing stuccoed front at No. 18 escaped through the
outbreak of war in 1914. But what is chiefly noteworthy is
the series of expensive refrontings or rebuildings exacted
from lessees that produced finely worked ashlar façades at
No. 17 (1906–7), Nos. 20 and 21 (1908–9), No. 14
(1908–11), No. 19 (1909–10) and No. 22 (1910). This was
accompanied by a setting-back of the frontage by several
feet. Further east, Nos. 37 and 38, on the return front of a
block in Park Street which was also visible from Grosvenor
House, were given a stone front in 1911–12 (Plate 46a in
vol. XXXIX). No. 1 was stone fronted in the same year, and a
big stone composition put up at Nos. 41–43 in 1912–14.
The first of these stone-fronted houses, at No. 17, had a
beguiling if odd elevation, with an Arts and Crafts
flavouring, by the estate surveyor's own firm of Balfour
and Turner (Plate 44d in vol. XXXIX), but its successors
were all in something closer to conventional classicism,
even if loose or exuberant like Nos. 19 and 21 (Plate 60c, 60d).
Some were built as speculations by lessees, some under
lease to the intending occupant. It is perhaps worth
noting, although it is rather a commonplace of the estate,
that the architects of these striking fronts are not those
most obviously conspicuous in the profession before the
war of 1914–18, and some are the comparatively obscure
designers associated with building firms. The interiors
survive, with more or less alteration, at Nos. 17, 19–21, 22
and 41–43, and other pre-1914 interior decoration at Nos.
11, 15, 18 and 47. Generally they show a neo-Georgian
manner, that continued after the 1914–18 war—for
example, at No. 48—but at least two houses, the stucco-fronted Nos. 16 and 23, have 'Jacobethan' features perhaps
of about 1902.
The neo-Georgian brick-and-stone exterior was exhibited in a rather idiosyncratic form at No. 47 in 1905, but
the inter-war examples in the flats at Grosvenor House,
Nos. 39–40 and No. 46 are unremarkable. Interior work of
the inter-war period exists at Nos. 17, 20, 44–45, 47 and 48.
As in Upper Brook Street, the external changes since
1939 have not been substantial. Even inside the houses
radical reconstructions have been few, however great the
transformation wrought by small pervasive alterations
consequent on the replacement of the private householder
by offices and the inter-war flats. Three houses (Nos. 44,
45 and 48), however, remain in private occupation, to
whose number the house at No. 19 is being added by
reconversion (1978–9).