CHAPTER XVII

Mount Street and Carlos Place

Though entirely reconstructed between 1880 and 1900, Mount Street has kept closely to the functions which it acquired when the estate was first laid out, since from the start it was devoted chiefly to shops and businesses serving the fashionable quarters to its north and south. The presence of a workhouse and of some necessarily noisy and dirty trades in the years before rebuilding meant that old Mount Street was far from being elegant; it never had the chic connotations of other shopping streets of the West End such as Bond Street. Arguably the first Duke's policy of rebuilding the street in ornamental ranges of shops with gentlemen's flats or houses above achieved these qualities and aims at the expense of some of its more basic facilities. Nevertheless Mount Street remains the centre on the estate for certain types of shopping, and for general transactions is overshadowed only by Oxford Street.