Beaumont Street runs from Marylebone High Street to the junction of Westmoreland Street and Weymouth Street. It was named after Sir Beaumont Hotham, local leaseholder in the late 18th century.
The street’s story began soon after the Marylebone Gardens closed in 1776, the line of the northern half being mostly laid out over the site of the gardens. The southern part was already partly developed by then.
Building leases were granted to the Thomas Neales, senior and junior, and John White, among others in the late 1780s. The street was advertised as being in as “pleasant and as healthy a situation as in the country”.
Shopkeepers and professionals moved in including a lady perfumer, surgeon, cheesemonger and a bookseller-stationer. Additionally there was a teacher of writing and accounting whose manuscript collection was open to the public.
The first residents in the 1790s included a botanical painter and a celebrated harpist, Anne-Marie Krumpholtz. Nearby was the Wimpole Street harp manufactory of J. Elouis.
In the course of the nineteenth century, Beaumont Street began a social descent. Thus in the mid 1880s, as original leases came up for renewal, Beaumont Street was ’improved’ by the Portland Estate.
Various lodging houses were already acting as nursing homes and by 1913, contemporary reports stated that Beaumont Street “probably holds the most, for at least thirty of its houses are devoted to invalids”.
Several houses were destroyed in the Second World War and indeed all of the original houses have now gone, apart from No. 28 and No. 1.
Post-war, Beaumont Street has seen much high-class redevelopment for private residential and medical use, much of it on the pre-war pattern of blocks rather than terraces or individual houses.
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