Fashionable London adresses

Grosvenor Street, near Park Lane (right)

Grosvenor Square (Left)

“One’s address was a symbol of status. Maria obtained ‘one of the best houses in Wimpole Street’; the Johan Dashwoods (Sense and Sensibility) were well situated in Harley Street; while the Bingleys (Pride and Prejudice) found equally upper-crust accommodations in Mr. Hurst’s house in Grosvenor Street. By contrast, the Gardiners, who were in trade, lived in Gracechurch Street, in the commercial district of London and within sight of Mr. Gardiner’s warehouse.” From: Jane Austen’s Town and Country Style by Susan Watkins.Wimpole Street

“The Georgian period in London coincided very neatly with the Palladian Revival in architecture and art. Lord Burlington, in his 1715 design of Burlington House in Piccadilly, played a major role in popularizing this classical style which became the norm for much of the century. A few years later, in 1725, Lord Burlington was at it again, with his remodeling of Chiswick House, then a country retreat but now part of the greater London sprawl.

At the same time Grosvenor Square was laid out in Mayfair, part of the Grosvenor family’s development of that aristocratic district. More London squares followed, notably at Berkeley Square (design by William Kent). Kent was also responsible for building the Treasury Building(1733), and the Horse Guards (1745).”

Cred

The London Fog

Just wanted to note that apparently there was a constant fog lingering over London in the winters of the Regency Era, a result of fossil coals as fuel.

Mr. Simond’s, an American in Regency London, writes, March 5 1810:

“The inhabitants of London, such as they are seen in the streets, have, as well as the outside of their houses a sort of dingy, smoky look; not dirty absolutely–for you generally perceive clean linen–but the outside garments are of a dull, dark cast, and harmonize with mud and smoke. Prepossessed with a high opinion of English corpulency.”

Early 19th Century London

“The huge size of London meant that is was also the largest single market for basic consumer goods, which stimulated the production of shoes, clothing, furniture, bread, beer and the other necessities of life. London breweries were amongst the most capital intensive concerns in the land. The cattle driven to the market at Smithfield supplied hides for the tanners at Bermondsley who produced leather to be used in shoes, saddles, coaches, book bindings.” P. 35, London – World City, 1800-1840, Edited by Celina Fox, 1992, Yale University Press, New haven & London, in Association with The Museum of London. “By the turn of the nineteenth century London had almost ten thousand acres of market gardens serving the hungry metropolis. The gardens were richly fertilized with the dung from the streets and stables from London – each acre had sixty cartloads of manure spread over and dug into it each year. This contrasts with regular farming land about London which, during this period, was only manured once every three or four years. (During September to October.) As well as dung, the market gardeners made copious use of marl, dug up from Enfield chase to the north of the city. A by-product of marl production were thousands of fossilised dinosaur bones, to be sent down to the newly developed British Museum (although many, no doubt, were crushed for the market gardens as well). Manure and/or marl was ploughed in by a clumsy swing plough, and harrowed once ploughed over. Working the gardens began soon after Christmas. Once the weather was favourable, the market gardeners began by sowing the borders with radishes, spinach, onions as well many seed crops.” In An American in Regency England, 1810-1811, Louis Simond writes: “The streets have all common sewers, which drain the filth of every house. The drains preclude the awkward process by which necessaries are emptied at Paris, poisoning the air of whole streets during the night, with effluvia, hurtful and sometimes fatal to the inhabitants. Rich houses have what are called water-closets; a cistern in the upper story, filled with rain-water, communicates by a pipe and cock to a vessel of earthenware, which it constantly washes.”

How clean was Regency London?

Maps of London

The maps are links.