The ground between Victoria Station and the river occupies the site of the old manor of Neyte, which belonged to the Abbey of Westminster until confiscated by Henry VIII in 1536. It was a favourite residence of the Abbots, and here also lived John of Gaunt, and here John, son of Richard, Duke of York, was born in 1448. In 1592 the manor became a farm and passed with the Ebury Estate into the possession of the Grosvenor family.
The manor-house stood on the later St George’s Row, and in Pepys’ time was a popular pleasure-garden. Between the Willow Walk (Warwick Street) and the river were the Neat House Gardens, which supplied a large part of London with vegetables. The name lingered until the present century among the houses on the river-bank, and is still commemorated by Neat House Buildings in Ranelagh Road. The whole area was low-lying and swampy, and the neighbourhood of Eccleston Square was occupied by a vast osier bed.
In 1827, Cubitt raised the level of the district by depositing the earth excavated from St. Katharine’s Docks, and houses and squares were gradually completed.
The Monster tavern and garden, later the Monster pub and in the Row, was a name which was probably a corruption of monastery.The Monster was, for many years, the start of a line of horse-drawn buses known as the “Monster” buses.
St Georges Row was largely obliterated in a Luftwaffe raid on 17 April 1941. It became known to the people who lived through it as, simply, ’The Wednesday’. 148 people were killed that night in Pimlico and 564 injured. The Monster Tavern was destroyed.
The Abbots Manor Estate replaced St Georges Row in the 1950s.
