James Street
Plate 49a
This street is mentioned as an unnamed way from
Long Acre to Covent Garden in 1630. (ref. 141) As the
table on page 300 shows, all the building leases of
sites south of Hart (now Floral) Street ran from
Michaelmas 1635, and at least one house was
occupied in that year. (ref. 142) The street within
Covent Garden was fully occupied by 1638, when
it was given its present name in the St. Martin in
the Fields ratebooks. (ref. 143) The very generous width
of the street where it entered the Piazza gave it a
certain dignity which its present use largely as an
appendix to the market has obscured, and which
made the house at No. 27 more suitable for use
as the parsonage, from the earliest days until the
1820's, than can now easily be imagined (see
page 127). A few people of title lived in the street
in the seventeenth century. The houses, whose
site-plots have survived without much alteration,
were, however, not large, and were mostly
assessed for rates at modest amounts. Four shops
were separately assessed for rates in 1676, (ref. 1) and
four licensed victuallers had their premises in the
street in 1690. (ref. 144) No doubt proximity to the
Piazza made the houses more attractive than they
might otherwise have seemed. Sir Ralph Verney's sister Cary, Lady Gardiner, on her second
widowhood in 1684, moved to smaller accommodation in a furnished house on the site of No. 28
at £60 a year, and found some merits in it:
'I now rise at five A clok & after our six A clok
prayers, I walk in our quodrangle or in the Covent
Garden wher ther is a frechnes of Ayre, purer than
in St. James's Park, besids I have a house as is
very open backwards wch is comfortable to me
… tis near the Church wch is the chef advantag
of it'. (ref. 145) Some rebuilding took place on the east
side (at Nos. 6–9) in c. 1697–8 under Bedford
building leases: (ref. 146) most of the west side had been
alienated from the main line of the Russell family
by a family settlement of 1640–1, (ref. 147) but the two
sides retained a similar character and when Strype
described the street in 1720 the contrast he noted
was between the part in Covent Garden—'a very
handsome Street … well inhabited'—and the
inferior part in St. Martin's parish, north of the
Nag's Head. (ref. 8) Mortimer's Universal Director of
1763 includes three engravers, three medical men
and an apothecary among residents in the street,
but the proximity to the market and the access
afforded for through-traffic to Long Acre tended
towards the deterioration of the street: homely
trades were sufficiently numerous in 1779 for the
advent of a cheesemonger to be generally resented,
not as a threat to amenity but as unwelcome
competition; (ref. 148) and in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries James Street was
among those whose taverns and 'disorderly houses'
troubled the vestrymen. (ref. 149) The Post Office
Directory of 1850 lists a miscellany of trades in the
Covent Garden section of the street. Only four
premises, housing a basket-maker and three
potato salesmen, show the direct influence of the
market. Throughout the later nineteenth century this increased, and in 1900 twelve or thirteen
premises were so occupied. Even more are used
for market-trades today, and the surviving
eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century fabric
contributes less to the visual character of the street
than the wholesale fruit and vegetable shops
occupying most of the ground floors.
Ratepaying occupants of James Street include:
Lady Shurley, 1637; Sir John Cotton, baronet,
1637–8; Dr. Jackson, 1637–8, probably
either Abraham or Arthur Jackson, divines; Sir
Thomas Hanmoore, 1638; Sir John Seaton,
1639; Sir Charles Howard, 1640, and as third
Earl of Nottingham, 1644–5; Sir William Playters, 1644, member of the Long Parliament; Sir
Richard Ingleby, 1645; Sir David Cunningham,
1647; Sir Henry Herbert, c. 1647–56, Master of
the Revels, member of the Long Parliament; Sir
Robert Crumpton, 1651–2; Dr. Edward Warner,
1656–77; Richard Wiseman, 1666–72, surgeon;
Dr. Edward Duke, 1666–73; Sir John Barnard,
1669–70; Dr. Joye, 1675–6; Gregory King,
c. 1675–6, herald, genealogist, engraver and
statistician; Captain Henry Johnson, 1684–6;
Lady Gardiner, 1686–8; John Michael Wright,
1694, portrait painter; John Philips, c. 1698–
1702, ? John Phillips, author; Dr. Thomas West,
c. 1702–13; Captain William Bradbury, c. 1702–5;
Major Cook, c. 1705–6; Captain James Gilbert,
1706–11 or 1718; Richard Estcourt, 1712, actor
and dramatist; Mary Porter, 1722–33, actress;
Michael Moser, 1730–2, probably George
Michael Moser, chaser and enameller; James
Rottier, 1731–2, probably James Roettiers,
medallist; David Lewis, 1743–5,? poet; Charles
Grignion, 1750–72, line-engraver; Frances
Abington, 1770, actress; William Birch, 1783–
1784, ? enamel painter and engraver; James
Holland, 1829–36, ? painter.
David Garrick lodged in James Street from at
least September 1744 until April 1747. (ref. 150)
Nos. 8 and 9 James Street
<Demolished 1978.>
These houses were erected in 1865–6 under
eighty-year Bedford building leases from Midsummer 1864 granted to the local builder,
William Howard (ref. 151) (Plate 74c). The architect
is not known: as at No. 17 Russell Street, the
style is old-fashioned for its date. No. 8 was first
occupied by printers and No. 9 as dining-rooms. (ref. 10)
The four-storeyed fronts of these two buildings,
and the Floral Street front of No. 9, share a
boldly detailed Grecian exterior executed in
painted stucco. The ground-storey face to Floral
Street and the piers between the shops in James
Street are of horizontally coursed stucco, finished
with an entablature. The three-storeyed upper
face is divided into bays by plain pilaster-strips,
rising to the crowning cornice. There are three
narrow bays to Floral Street and each house has
one bay, two windows wide, to James Street. All
the windows are framed with band architraves
having moulded arrises, those of the second
storey being finished with pediments, and those of
the third storey with cornices, while both have a
bead-and-reel moulding extending between the
eared angles of the architrave. The cornices of the
second- and third-storey windows, and the sills
and heads of the fourth-storey windows, are linked
together by plain raised bands, which are returned round the dividing pilasters. The crowning cornice, enriched with dentils and an egg-anddart moulding, is surrounded by a low parapet.
Nos. 10 and 10A James Street:
the Nag's Head Public House
A public house called the Nag's Head has
occupied all or part of this site since at least the
1670's (ref. 152) and is marked on Lacy's map of 1673
(Plate 3).
The present building was erected in 1900
under an eighty-year Bedford building lease
granted to the licensed victualler who had
occupied the previous building. The architect
was P. E. Pilditch. (ref. 153)
The Nag's Head is a fairly restrained example
of neo-Jacobean public-house architecture. The
large oak-framed windows and doors of the bars
extend between plain piers and pilasters of polished
granite, used also for the stallboard. The upper
face is of red brick and terra-cotta, used for the
moulded storey-bands and sill-bands dividing
the three storeys, for the plain architraves of the
three-light windows of the second and third
storeys, and for the pedimented architraves of the
two-light windows in the top storey. The most
prominent feature, however, is the ogee-capped
circular tourelle with its elaborately modelled
terra-cotta aprons, corbelled out above the canted
corner entrance.
Nos. 28 and 29 James Street
Plate 49a
Both these eighteenth-century houses occupy
sites in that part of the street which had been
alienated from the main line of the Russell family
in 1640–1. The details of their building history
are not known. Between 1750 and 1772 No. 28
was occupied by Charles Grignion, the lineengraver employed by Hogarth for his 'Canvassing for Votes' and 'Garrick as Richard III'. (ref. 59)
The simply designed late-Georgian front of brickwork, now painted, is four storeys high and three
windows wide. All the windows are recessed in
plain openings having flat gauged brick arches,
and a simple cornice underlines the top storey,
which is finished with a plain pedestal parapet.
No. 29 has a plain stuccoed front, four storeys
high and two windows wide, its one interesting
feature being the surviving fascia of a lateGeorgian shop front. This is of wood and forms
an entablature, curving in a serpentine line to
conform with the two bowed windows, now
missing, and continuing with a shallow concave
curve above the former side doorway.