Leicester Square: Sir Isaac Newton

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Sir Walter Besant, in The Fascination of London, published in 1903, continues his survey of Leicester Square with a look at, among others, Sir Isaac Newton, who lived there:

The associations of this part are numerous and very interesting.

The busts of the four men standing in the corners of the centre garden have all some local connection.

They are those of Hogarth, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir Isaac Newton, and John Hunter.

Hogarth's house was on the east, on the site of Tenison's School, and next to it was that of John Hunter, the famous surgeon.

Sir Joshua Reynolds bought No. 47 on the west side in 1760, and lived in it until his death.

Sir Isaac Newton lived in the little street off the south side of the square, at the back of the big new Dental Hospital.

His house is still standing (1903), and bears a tablet of the Society of Arts.

It is quite unpretentious - a stucco-covered building with little dormer-windows in the roof.

The great scientist came here in 1710, when he was nearly sixty, and his fame was then world-wide.

Men from all parts of Europe sought the dull little street in order to converse with one whose power had wrought a revolution in the methods of scientific thought.

In the same house Miss Burney afterwards lived with her father.

Sir Thomas Lawrence took apartments at No. 4, Leicester Square, in 1786, when only seventeen, but he had already begun to exhibit at the Royal Academy.

The square was for long a favourite place of residence with foreigners, and has not even yet lost a slightly un-English aspect.

Archbishop Tenison's School is at the south-east corner of the square.

Its founder, who was successively Bishop of Lincoln and Archbishop of Canterbury, intended that it should counterbalance a flourishing Roman Catholic school in the Savoy precincts.

Among old boys may be mentioned Postlethwaite, afterwards Master of St. Paul's; Charles Mathews, when very young; Horne Tooke a former Lord Mayor of London; and Liston who was for a time usher.

The northern half of the square is in the parish of St. Anne's, Soho, a parish now tenanted to a very large extent by foreigners, chiefly French and Italians. Shaftesbury Avenue, running diagonally through the parish, is of very recent origin.

Next: Soho