Bloomsbury: Great Russell Street

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W. J. Loftie, adding to the incomplete work of Sir Walter Besant, in The Fascination of London, published in 1903, continues his survey of Bloomsbury with this look at Great Russell Street:

In Little Russell Street are the parochial schools. These were established in 1705 in Museum Street, and were removed in 1880 to the present building.

They were founded by Dr. Carter for the maintenance, clothing, and education of twenty-five girls, and the clothing and education of eighty boys.

The intentions of the founder are still carried out, as recorded on a stone slab on the front of the building, which is a neat brick edifice, with a group of a woman and child in stone in a niche high up, and an appropriate verse from Proverbs below.

Allusion has already been made to New Oxford Street.

It extends from Tottenham Court Road to Bury Street, and is lined by fine shops and large buildings, chiefly in the ornamental stuccoed style.

The Royal Arcade - "a glass-roofed arcade of shops extending along the rear of four or five of the houses, and having an entrance from the street at each end" - was opened about 1852, but did not answer the expectations formed of it, and was pulled down (Walford).

At the corner of Museum Street, once Peter Street, is Mudie's famous library. The founder, who died in 1890, began a lending library in King Street in 1840, and in 1852 removed to the present quarters. In 1864 the concern was turned into a limited liability company. The distribution of books now reaches almost incredible figures.

Great Russell Street Strype describes as being very handsome and very well inhabited.

Thanet House, the town residence of the Thanets in the seventeenth century, stood on the north side.

Sir Christopher Wren built a house for himself in this street. Among the inhabitants and lodgers have been Shelley and Hazlitt, J. P. Kemble, Speaker Onslow, Pugin the elder, Charles Mathews the elder, and, in later years, Sir E. Burne-Jones.

At the west end Great Russell Street runs into Tottenham Court Road, a portion of which lies in the parish of St. Giles.

Toten Hall itself, from which the name is taken, stood at the south end of the Hampstead Road, and an account of it belongs to the parish of St. Pancras.

There is little to remark upon in that part of the Road we can now claim.

At the south end is Meux's well-known brewery, bought by the family of that name in 1809.

In 1814 an immense vat burst here, which flooded the immediate neighbourhood in a deluge of liquor.

The Horseshoe Hotel can claim fairly ancient descent; it has been in existence as a tavern from 1623. It was called the Horseshoe from the shape of its first dining-room.

A Consumption Hospital stands midway between North and South Crescent.

Next: Bloomsbury: Bedford Square