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Fitzroy Square was laid out between 1790 and 1840 as a speculative housing development aimed at aristocratic residents.
It occupied land called Home Field, owned by Charles Fitzroy, who was
raised to the peerage as Lord Southampton in 1780. In the early 1790s
he commissioned the distinguished architect Robert Adam to provide
designs for a handsome new square. When Adam died, in 1794, only the
east and south sides had been completed to his grand designs; the other
two sides were not finished until the 1830s.
During the Victorian and Edwardian periods, Fitzroy Square was at the
centre of Bohemian London life: the neighbourhood, known then as now as
Fitzrovia, was a favourite area for artists and writers. George Bernard
Shaw and Virginia Woolf both lived in Fitzroy Square and Roger Fry’s
Omega Workshop, creating avant-garde furniture, was housed at No33.
After the First World War many of the buildings were turned over to
commercial, office and institutional use and the trend continued after
the Second War, when the southern flank was badly damaged in bombing.
Adam’s stone façade was later restored and new office accommodation
built behind it.
The trend is now firmly in the opposite direction, back towards
high-quality residential use. Several houses have become single
residences again, writers are moving back in and the garden – owned and
maintained, as it has been since the 1820s, by a committee of residents
– is an especially attractive green space. With the railings
reinstated, the west façade freshly repainted and the square now
largely traffic-free, Fitzroy Square is in better shape than at any
time since the 19th century.
The Georgian Group has been in the vanguard of this improvement. It
moved in to No 6, part of Adam’s grand stone-fronted east side, in the
1990s and has gradually restored the house, reversing interventions
made by the bank that had occupied the building for much of the
twentieth century. The outside is now marked by two handsome iron
lanterns set in the original front railings and a wide front door with
an elegant fanlight. The stone paved entrance hall and original stone
staircase lead up to the two principal rooms on the first floor. These
rooms have handsome plaster cornices and marble fireplaces with
polished floor boards. When built, No 6 was described as a First Rate
house, in other words a terraced house on a large scale, intended for
the top end of the market. Over the last few years it has recovered
something of the atmosphere and opulence that its original occupants
would have known. |
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