Belgrave Square

“ The houses are mainly uniform in type—square, substantial, plaster-fronted structures, which give an aspect of monotony to the whole district. [Pg 61]
Belgrave Square, 10 acres in extent, is 684 feet long by 637 feet wide, and was designed by Basevi and built by Cubitt in 1825-28. The detached houses in the corners are by Philip Hardwick, R.A., and H. E. Kendall (west side) . An enclosed garden occupies the centre.
Inhabitants: No. 5, General Sir George Murray, d. 1846, Earl of Shaftesbury, d. 1886; 15, Duke of Bedford ”

“ Chapter One. “If we could get hold of one of these mines between us, we would show them how to work it, I guess. We wouldn’t fool around the camp trying to float a company and let a lot of local men into the thing. We’d go straight home and give the British public a turn. Couldn’t you fancy yourself as the South African millionnaire chairman of the Great Diamond Mining Company, with a house in Belgrave Square, a country house with a blessed big park round it, the favourite for the Derby in training at Newmarket, and the best of everything that money could buy, eh, Timson?” ”

“ Pancras parish, he built the houses of Upper Woburn Place, Woburn Buildings, Gordon Square, Tavistock, Gordon, and Endsleigh streets, and part of Euston Square. Perceiving the tendency of the fashionable world to move westward, he proceeded, in 1825, to lease the Five Fields, Chelsea, on which he erected Belgrave Square, Lowndes Square, Chesham Place, and other ranges of houses. ”

“ Cadogan Place is the one slight bond that joins two great extremes; it is the connecting link between the aristocratic pavements of Belgrave Square, and the barbarism of Chelsea. ”

“ Once there, he made his way—and a long way it was—to the fashionable quarter of Belgrave Square. It was a sultry July afternoon, the very pavement was hot, the air oppressive—people were beginning to talk of Cowes and Scotland.
Nevertheless, many gay equipages [Pg 29] were dashing about, containing society notabilities and bright parasols. ”

“ The Belgrave district is as monotonous as Mary-le-bone; and is so contrived as to be at the same time insipid and tawdry.
Where London becomes more interesting is Charing Cross. Looking to Northumberland House, and turning your back upon Trafalgar Square, the Strand is perhaps the finest street in Europe, blending the architecture of many periods; and its river ways are a peculiar feature and rich with associations. Fleet Street, with its Temple, is not unworthy of being contiguous to the Strand. The fire of London has deprived us of the delight of a real old quarter of the city ”

“ London contains in the West End many squares surrounded by handsome residences, among them probably the best known being Belgrave, Russell, Bedford, Grosvenor, Hanover, and Cavendish Squares. Eaton Square is said to be the largest of these, Grosvenor Square the most fashionable, and Cavendish Square the most salubrious and best cultivated. The line of streets leading by Oxford Street to the Marble Arch entrance to Hyde Park is London's most fashionable route of city travel, and on Tottenham Court Road, which starts northward from Oxford Street, is the "Bell Inn" at Edmonton. ”

“ Beside the parks and gardens, London has an infinity of squares, commons, and crescents, which are surrounded by private residences and inclosed by railings and walls—such as Trafalgar Square (public) , Bedford, Cavendish, St. George's, Grosvenor, Leicester, Soho, Belgrave, Euston, Finsbury, Fitzroy, Portman, Russell, Wellclose, Hanover, Brunswick, Eaton, Berkeley, Golden, Mecklenburg, Red Lion, Tavistock, and a great number of other squares which I do not now call to mind. ”

“ They walk slowly round and round the square, abreast, singing together a tune which resembles the solemn grandeur of a Gregorian chant, and after each verse the whole audience, several hundred powerful male voices, intone the refrain. It is an intensely impressive performance and one feels thrilled at being the only white man present at such a spectacle. The bright moonlight shines down on the massed ranks of motionless natives whose faces look black, much darker than they actually are, in comparison with their white robes and white skull caps or turbans. ”

“ The fires in the square, heaped up with rushes, blaze more brightly when the honey-coloured moon sinks behind the high walls of the town, and frantically writhing figures are seen whirling round by the light of the shooting flames and torches. The whole scene becomes even more macabre. Gradually boys and men among the audience, fascinated by the mad mob of dancers, plunge in among them, linking arms and revolving round the musicians in the centre, crouching, jumping, hopping, and running, each one executing strange steps and postures as he goes along. ”

“ Among the shadows of the houses there are more blurred white figures, and in one corner of the square kettles are being boiled on open fires, and men in flowing robes walk to and fro across the light from the flames. There is a subdued murmur of conversation. The first part of the entertainment is a solemn tea-drinking. ”

“ Belgrave Road (1830) is a broad, well-built street, with large houses. In 1865 Eccleston Terrace, North and South Warwick Terrace, Upper Eccleston Place, and Grosvenor Terrace, were incorporated with it. Nearly opposite Eccleston Square is Eccleston Square Chapel (Congregational) , in Classical style, with seats for 1,100. The railway is crossed by Eccleston Bridge. Eccleston Square is 4 acres in extent, and is long and narrow, with an enclosed garden, built in 1835.
Warwick Square, of 3 acres, is very similar, and was built in 1843. At the end stands St. ”

“ Now a broad red wall is one of the most dreary objects of modern civilisation, and, indeed, the side of a square, broken only by rectangular windows, as exhibited in London squares, has doubtless had a depressing and injurious effect on the duration of human life. Russell Square and Bedford Square are familiar instances of this; and how unfavourably they contrast with old Lincoln’s Inn buildings, in the same city, the engraving will show, yet the same architecture that prevails in Lincoln’s Inn would abundantly serve all the purposes of a London square of modern times. ”

“ Let me confess at once that we are a bit supercilious in our attitude toward the sister Square far to our West, across the Alps of Broadway. Our Square was an established center of the social respectabilities when the foot of Fifth Avenue was still frequented by the occasional cow whose wanderings are responsible for the street-plan of Greenwich Village. Our Square remains true to the ancient and simple traditions, whereas Washington Square has grown long hair, smeared its fingers with paint and its lips with free verse, and gone into debt for its inconsiderable laundry bills. ”

“ There can be nothing in the world more charming than the way the Square receives its friends. Let it number amongst its guests a Duchess, that is no reason why it should scorn "Colonel Harry" or "Mouldy Jim," the singer of hymns. Scorn, indeed, cannot be found within its grey walls, soft grey, soft green, soft white and blue—in these colours is the Square's body clothed, no anger in its mild eyes, nor contempt anywhere at its heart.
The Square is proud, and is proud with reason, of its garden. It is not a large garden as London gardens go. It has in its centre a fountain. ”

“ And let not those whose eyes have been accustomed to the aristocratic gravity of Grosvenor Square and Hanover Square, the dowager barrenness and frigidity of Fitzroy Square, or the gravel walks and garden seats of the Squares of Russell and Euston, suppose that the affections of Tim Linkinwater, or the inferior lovers of this particular locality, had been awakened and kept alive by any refreshing associations with leaves however dingy, or grass, however bare and thin. The City square has no inclosure, save the lamp-post in the middle, and no grass but the weeds which spring up round its base. ”

“ Indeed the aspect of Bedford Square, where the great institution of the basement and area still flourished in perfection, and wealthy menials with traditional manners lived sensually in caves beneath the spacious, calm salons of their employers and dupes,—the aspect of Bedford Square gave the illusion that evolution was not, and that Bloomsbury and the whole impressive structure of British society could never change. ”

“ The squares have a look of seclusion, of shady walks, and retired leisure, which there is nothing to rival either in Belgravia or Mayfair. It is, or was—for it is many years since the present writer has passed over their broad pavements,{14} or stood under the large, benignant, and stately shadow of the trees in Russell Square—a region apart, above fashion, a sober heart and centre of an older and steadier London, such as is not represented in the Row, and takes little part in the rabble and rout of fashion, the decent town of earlier days. ”

“ OLD SQUARES. THE old, smaller squares in London are very interesting from their tranquil, retired air and antique pattern, and venerable trees. None is more characteristic than Queen Square in Bloomsbury, with its pleasant Queen Anne and Georgian houses running round. Most of these inclosures were laid out originally after the Dutch manner, which is still apparent. It must be a curious solitary sensation to live in one of these retreats, and they are affected by students and literary men. ”

“ Three fine squares alone break the monotony of all these parallelograms of streets: Washington Square, Union Square, and Madison Square.
On the north, Central Park, with its fine avenues, its hillocks, its valleys, its lakes, and its magnificent terrace over the Hudson, is a very lovely pleasure ground. It is the only place where one can see trees, turf, and flowers. New York does not possess a single garden, public or private, if one excepts the three squares I named just now.
That which strikes the visitor to New York is not the city itself, but the feverish activity that reigns there. ”

“ And some men have formed a Saint James’s Square school of thought, but it was in Berkeley Square that the poet, critic, and commentator, who was sober, distinctly heard the song of the nightingale, on a night in the heart of the drought of the year 1921.
In the drawing-room of a house midway on the entailed side of the square sat a lady and a gentleman silently. Or rather, the lady lay, while the gentleman sat, and the sofa on which she lay was far from the arm-chair in which he sat. ”

“ Beauregard Square is not close to a trolley line, and quiet is the neighborhood tradition. The first rubber-tired vehicles in the city drew up before Beauregard Square houses. Beauregard Square children speak in low voices and never bang their spoons on their plates. Beauregard Square servants wear felt-soled shoes. And such outside noises as venture to intrude themselves must filter through double brick walls and doors built when lumber was selling by the thousand acres instead of the square foot. ”

“ There is no house that can claim beauty, and yet the Square, as a whole, has a fine charm, something that age and colour, haphazard adventure, space and quiet have all helped towards.
There is, perhaps, no square in London that clings so tenaciously to any sign or symbol of old London that motor-cars and the increase of speed have not utterly destroyed. All the oldest London mendicants find their way, at different hours of the week, up and down the Square. There is, I believe, no other square in London where musicians are permitted. ”

“ The dark, dismal lane, named Poorthing Lane, besides forming an asylum for decayed and would-be aristocrats, and a vestibule, as it were, to Beverly Square, was a convenient retreat for sundry green-grocers and public-house keepers and small trades-people, who supplied the densely-peopled surrounding district, and even some of the inhabitants of Beverly Square itself, with the necessaries of life. ”

“ Half a dozen of them, like Belgrave, Grosvenor, and Berkeley Squares, are hemmed in on all sides by the gloomy and palatial dwellings of the governing class of England, who seek to absorb even a stray blade of grass, or the leaves of a scantily clothed tree, sooner than allow the poor and degraded to enjoy them. ”

“ There is scarcely a plot of ground below Fourteenth Street without its story and its associations, its motley company of memories and spectres both good and bad, its imperishably adventurous savour of the past, imprisoned in the dry prose of registries and records. Let us just take a glance, a bird's-eye view as it were, of that region which we now know as Washington Square, as it was when the city of New York bought it for a Potter's Field. ”

“ New York knows little of Our Square, submerged as we are in a circle of slums. Yet for us, as for more Elysian fields, the crocus springs in the happy grass, the flash and song of the birds stir our trees, and Romance fans us with the wind of its imperishable wing.
The first robin was singing in our one lone lilac when the Bonnie Lassie came out of the Somewhere Else into Our Square and possessed herself of the ground floor of our smallest house, the nestly little dwelling with the quaint old door and the broad, friendly vestibule, next but one to the Greek church. ”

“ London, more than any in the world, is a city of squares; a feudal remnant has there set most of the important houses, while those of the vassals were placed in the side streets, and those of the churls in the mews. The squares imply social classifications, and though many of them, such as Golden Square, Soho Square, Regent Square, have103 fallen into the hands of the poor or of commerce, they all began by being centres of polite society. ”

“ Washington Square we suspect of playing at life; Our Square has a sufficiently hard time living it. We have little in common.
Nevertheless, it must be admitted that there are veritable humans, not wholly submerged in the crowd of self-conscious mummers who crowd the Occidental park-space, and it was at the house of one of these, a woman architect with a golden dream of rebuilding Greenwich Village, street by street, into something simple and beautiful and, in the larger sense urban, that the Bonnie Lassie, whose artistic deviations often take her far afield, met Barbran. ”