The land on which the southern part of Endell Street is built was originally owned by William Short, who leased it to Esmé Stewart, 3rd Duke of Lennox, in 1623–24. Lennox House was built on the site which eventually passed to Sir John Brownlow who began to build from 1682.
Belton Street was created, named after the Brownlow’s country seat in Lincolnshire, Belton House.Henry Wheatley writes that the southern end of the street from Castle Street to Short’s Gardens was originally known as Old Belton Street, the northern end from Short’s Gardens to St Giles, was known as New Belton Street.
In the seventeenth century, Queen Anne is supposed to have bathed in the waters from a medical spring there at a site known as Queen Anne’s Bath.
The modern Endell Street was created according to the reforming plans of architect James Pennethorne.
Charles Lethbridge Kingsford states that the street was built in 1846 when Belton Street was widened and extended northwards to Broad Street (now in High Holborn). The street is believed to have been named after the Reverend James Endell Tyler, rector of St Giles in the Fields in the 1840s.
During the first world war a military hospital operated from Endell Street, staffed entirely by women. The hospital was opened in 1915 by suffragists Dr. Flora Murray and Dr. Louisa Garrett Anderson and treated 24,000 patients and carried out over 7,000 operations. It closed in 1919. The hospital was sited on land formerly used as a workhouse.
St Paul’s Hospital relocated from Red Lion Square to 24 Endell Street in 1923. It became the first artificial kidney unit in the United Kingdom in 1959 and performed the first kidney dialysis in the U.K. in 1961. The building is now The Hospital Club.
