Percy Street is a street in the London Borough of Camden that runs from Rathbone Street in the west to Tottenham Court Road in the east. At its western end it is joined by Rathbone Place and Charlotte Street. Nearby Percy Mews is off Rathbone Place. The street was built in the 1760s and is known for the number of artists that have lived there.
The land on which Percy Street is built was owned by Francis and William Goodge. They granted leases on the south side in 1764 and the north side in 1766. Twenty-eight houses had been completed by 1770. [1]
The architecture of Percy Street is undistinguished. Most of the buildings are generic three-storey Georgian town houses with standard interior features. The ground floors of around half the houses on the street have been converted to retail use, and on the north side a large modern office block is situated on the corner of Tottenham Court Road. Number 21 was destroyed by bombing during the Second World War. Some of the houses have been resurfaced in concrete and had extra storeys added. [1]
Number 1 Percy Street was the site of the White Tower restaurant, formerly the Eiffel Tower hotel and restaurant. The restaurant was taken over by Rudolf Stulik, the former chef to Lord Kitchener, [2] in 1910 and became very popular with painters of the Vorticist movement in 1914 and was frequented by Augustus John in the 1930s. John took the young lady who became Dylan Thomas's wife to one of the Eiffel Tower Hotel rooms on an assignation before her marriage. Among its patrons were Archduke Rudolph, Madame Kharsavina, Lord Birkenhead, Chaliapin, the Duke of Gloucester, and George Bernard Shaw, as well as the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII. It was memorialised in William Roberts' painting The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring 1915 (completed 1961–2). [3] It became the White Tower in 1943. [4] Since then it became Bam-Bou, an Asian restaurant. [5] Today it is the flagship venue, House of Ho, a fine dining modern Vietnamese restaurant with a sister site in Soho. [6] In 1922 the street was home to the New Court Club where Freda Kempton met the Chinese drug dealer Brilliant Chang, [7] a meeting which may have led to her death.
Among the people who have lived in Percy Street have been:
Barbara Bagenal lived at no 18 on the floor below Sonia Orwell between 1951 and 1964, and frequently shared her accommodation with her partner Clive Bell.
The Eiffel Tower is a wrought-iron lattice tower on the Champ de Mars in Paris, France. It is named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower from 1887 to 1889.
Down and Out in Paris and London is the first full-length work by the English author George Orwell, published in 1933. It is a memoir in two parts on the theme of poverty in the two cities. Its target audience was the middle- and upper-class members of society—those who were more likely to be well educated—and it exposes the poverty existing in two prosperous cities: Paris and London. The first part is an account of living in near-extreme poverty and destitution in Paris and the experience of casual labour in restaurant kitchens. The second part is a travelogue of life on the road in and around London from the tramp's perspective, with descriptions of the types of hostel accommodation available and some of the characters to be found living on the margins.
Vorticism was a London-based modernist art movement formed in 1914 by the writer and artist Wyndham Lewis. The movement was partially inspired by Cubism and was introduced to the public by means of the publication of the Vorticist manifesto in Blast magazine. Familiar forms of representational art were rejected in favour of a geometric style that tended towards a hard-edged abstraction. Lewis proved unable to harness the talents of his disparate group of avant-garde artists; however, for a brief period Vorticism proved to be an exciting intervention and an artistic riposte to Marinetti's Futurism and the Post-Impressionism of Roger Fry's Omega Workshops.
Tottenham Court Road is a major road in Central London, almost entirely within the London Borough of Camden.
Oxford Street is a major road in the City of Westminster in the West End of London, running from Tottenham Court Road to Marble Arch via Oxford Circus. It marks the notional boundary between the areas of Fitzrovia and Marylebone to the north, with Soho and Mayfair to its immediate south. It is Europe's busiest shopping street, with around half a million daily visitors, and as of 2012 had approximately 300 shops. It is designated as part of the A40, a major road between London and Fishguard, though it is not signed as such, and traffic is regularly restricted to buses and taxis.
Euston Road is a road in Central London that runs from Marylebone Road to King's Cross. The route is part of the London Inner Ring Road and forms part of the London congestion charge zone boundary. It is named after Euston Hall, the family seat of the Dukes of Grafton, who had become major property owners in the area during the mid-19th century.
Sonia Mary Brownell, better known as Sonia Orwell, was the second wife of writer George Orwell. Sonia is believed to be the model for Julia, the heroine of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Fitzrovia is a district of central London, England, near the West End. The eastern part of the area is in the London Borough of Camden, and the western in the City of Westminster. It has its roots in the Manor of Tottenham Court, and was urbanised in the 18th century. Its name was coined in the late 1930s by Tom Driberg.
Frederick Etchells was an English artist and architect.
Jessica Stewart Dismorr was an English painter and illustrator. Dismorr participated in almost all of the avant-garde groups active in London between 1912 and 1937 and was one of the few English painters of the 1930s to work in a completely abstract manner. She was one of only two women members of the Vorticist movement and also exhibited with the Allied Artists Association, the Seven and Five Society and the London Group. She was the only female contributor to Group X and displayed abstract works at the 1937 Artists' International Association exhibition. Poems and illustrations by Dismorr appeared in several avant-garde publications including Blast, Rhythm and an edition of Axis.
St George's Cathedral is an Antiochian Orthodox church in Albany Street, St Pancras, in the London Borough of Camden. Built to the designs of James Pennethorne, it was consecrated as an Anglican place of worship called Christ Church in 1837. It became an Orthodox cathedral in 1989.
Tite Street is a street in Chelsea, London, England, within the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, just north of the River Thames. It was laid out from 1877 by the Metropolitan Board of Works, giving access to the Chelsea Embankment.
Charlotte Street is a street in Fitzrovia, historically part of the parish and borough of St Pancras, in central London. It has been described, together with its northern and southern extensions, as the spine of Fitzrovia.
Rathbone Place is a street in central London that runs roughly north-west from Oxford Street to Percy Street. it is joined on its eastern side by Percy Mews, Gresse Street, and Evelyn Yard. The street is mainly occupied by retail and office premises.
Rathbone Street is a street in London that runs between Charlotte Street in the north and the junction of Rathbone Place and Percy Street in the south. The street is partly in the London Borough of Camden and partly in the City of Westminster.
Chenies Street is a street in Bloomsbury, London, that runs between Tottenham Court Road and Gower Street. It is the location of a number of notable buildings such as Minerva House, the Drill Hall, and a memorial to The Rangers, 12th County of London Regiment. North Crescent starts and ends on the northern side of Chenies Street.
William Franks was an early English property developer who was instrumental in the development of Percy Street, Rathbone Street and Charlotte Street in central London in the area now known as Fitzrovia. He married a member of the Pepys family and built the Percy Chapel in Charlotte Street.
William Franks was a landowner in East Barnet, Hadley Wood and Cheshunt, and the owner of a large estate in the former Enfield Chace.
The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring 1915 is a 1961–1962 painting by the English artist William Roberts. It depicts the Vorticist group gathered at a French restaurant in London.
This is a list of the etymology of street names in the London district of Fitzrovia. The following utilises the generally accepted boundaries of Fitzrovia viz. Euston Road to the north, Tottenham Court Road to the east, Oxford Street to the south and Great Portland Street to the west.
Media related to Percy Street, London at Wikimedia Commons