Dartmouth Street leads north from Tothill Street and dates from the seventeenth century.
Dartmouth Street was named for both Admiral George Legge, 1st Earl of Dartmouth, and William Legge, Lord Privy Seal in the 1710s.
Admiral George Legge was one of James II’s principal advisers and a kinsman of the powerful Villiers family which influenced all the Stuart sovereigns. His townhouse was a mansion in Tothill Street with grounds stretching back to St James’s Park. It was demolished in 1683 to make way for Dartmouth Street. In 1673, he also purchased the country manor of Lewisham: hence Lewisham Street, an offshoot of Dartmouth Street, and Dartmouth Grove, Hill and Row and Legge Street in Lewisham.
In 1755 George’s great-grandson William, the 2nd Earl of Dartmouth acquired by marriage land at Kentish Town and Highgate. The Kentish Town field was developed in the 1860s by the 5th Earl, who employed as his land agent John Eeles Lawford, a local Churchwarden and slate merchant, the founder of Lawford and Sons, builders’ merchants in Camden Town.
He built Lawford, Patshull and Sandall Roads. Patshull was the family home in Staffordshire, and Sandall in the West Riding of Yorkshire probably part of the Earl’s 8000 acres of property in that county. The Highgate estate-Dartmouth Park Avenue, Hill and Road and Woodsome Road - named after the family seat near Huddersfield - was developed 1870-1885, and still belonged to the Earls of Dartmouth in the early twentieth century.
At the intersection of Dartmouth Street and Old Queen Street, are the Cockpit Stairs, leading to the Royal Cockpit built in 1689. This venue was infamous for hosting cockfighting, a pastime that had been prohibited during Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth era. The Royal Cockpit was demolished in 1810. In 1762, James Boswell, the biographer and friend of Dr Samuel Johnson, attended a cockfight there, expressing his resolution to be a "true-born Englishman." However, this assertion is likely fictitious, as Boswell was a Scot.
Adjacent to the Cockpit Stairs, the "Two Chairmen" pub on Hertford Street was established possibly in 1729. The Two Chairmen is thought to be the oldest public house in Westminster. The pub’s name is a nod to the practice of hiring sedan chairs, which were available for rent outside the establishment. Sedan chairs, a popular mode of transport for short London journeys, allowed passengers to travel above the city’s filth and mud. They were introduced in the early years of King Charles I’s reign.
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Dartmouth Street leads north from Tothill Street and dates from the seventeenth century.
