Mantell Street, N1

Mantell Street, originally Sermon Lane, is now part of Tolpuddle Street.

Sermon Lane had been possibly so named in memory of religious gatherings in White Conduit Fields. By the nineteenth century it contained a ragged school and some tightly packed courts to the east, and a cow yard and miscellaneous sheds to the west.

The six cottages of Mount Sion Place were built for Isaac Foster in 1795, with the even smaller houses of Mount Court following around 1810, and others there and at Mount Place by the 1820s. Mount Court was later known as Russell Place and Vittoria Place. Three houses of c. 1810 further west made up White Conduit Place.

Sermon Lane Ragged School was founded in 1849, and accommodated in a single-room schoolhouse from 1851. This was rebuilt as a somewhat larger mission room around 1879, and the Sermon Lane Mission moved away in 1921.

Sermon Lane was renamed Mantell Street in 1910 and the courts and yards were soon after cleared, a larger site being redeveloped as Mandeville Houses in the 1920s. The Mantell Street name recalls the Commandery Mantells or Mantles, as the fields in the north of Clerkenwell were collectively called.

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