History notes: University of Westminster Cavendish Block

The University of Westminster is currently putting together plans to redevelop part of its site at New Cavendish Street in Fitzrovia West, with a planning application to Westminster Council likely to be submitted sometime in early 2025.

This plot of land was a marshy field outside London until the mid-18th century but it underwent rapid change along with the surrounding area as the city expanded northwards.

The six-sided city block has an interesting history of land development and there are some freely available maps showing details of the site before the university buildings arrived in the late 1960s, as well as some archive photographs of the buildings on New Cavendish Street, Cleveland Street, and Clipstone Street from the early- to mid-20th century.

The land west of Cleveland Street was mostly owned by the Duke of Portland Estate; with a thin strip of land belonging to the Berners Estate, where houses lining the west side of the street were built. As London expanded the estates sold off plots of land under leasehold to small developers to build on and construction north of what is today New Cavendish Street began in earnest in the 1770s.

One developer of part of the site was the stone mason John Bastard, states the Survey of London: South-East Marylebone. He built “a couple of houses on the north side of Upper Marylebone (now New Cavendish) Street along with the Fitzroy Arms in Clipstone Street behind, all leased to him in 1776, two years before his death. The houses thus built were largely of standard mid-Georgian type, brick-fronted, two windows wide in front and rising to only three main storeys above ground; the higher full attic and stuccoed ground storey shown in photographs appear invariably to be the result of changes insisted on by Portland lease renewals in Victorian times.”

None of those buildings from the 18th century remain but some of them can be seen in the following two archive photographs of 50 to 59 Upper Marylebone Street in the early part of the 20th century. The first image is taken from near the junction with Ogle Street and looks east toward Howland Street. The second looks west from near the junction with Cleveland Street.

The backyards of the buildings that ringed the site were later used for the Fitzroy Works furniture workshops, and it was on this site that the London County Council later built a school, demolishing several houses in the middle of the section of the street shown above.

Upper Marylebone Street School opened in August 1914. It was built by Henry Lovatt Ltd and had space for 768 children, with many of them transfered from the Portland, Barratt Street and Trinity Church of England Schools which were then closed. “Some 40 percent of the intake were said to be of Jewish origin from the outset,” states the Survey.

In researching her book Fitzrovia, the other side of Oxford Street, Ann Basu looked at the 1911 census records of a sample of nearby streets and found over a thousand people — an international community — scattered across 92 addresses. Only 268 of the 766 adults were born in Britain and there was “evidence of movement from East London to Fitzrovia, particularly of Jewish families”, she writes.

“The double house where my mother’s family later lived, 48-50 Howland Street [long since demolished], is a good example of international mixing in 1911. It housed the Altman family from Russia, Carl Meyer from Germany and the Hartings, a German man married to a Norwegian woman with two Norwegian-born children, as well as several English residents, two of them born locally,” she found.

Former pupil Sam Lomberg started at Upper Marylebone Street School in 1924 aged four and recalled it as “divided into a boys school, girls school and infants school. It was a three-storey building, well planned, light and pleasantly decorated. Considering that it was in the built-up West End (we didn’t call it Fitzrovia in those days) it had fairly large playgrounds — one for boys, one for girls,” he wrote.

It was later called Clipstone School when the street was renamed New Cavendish Street in 1936.

The following series of photographs from the early- and mid-20th century shows images from the viewpoint of someone walking east along New Cavendish Street from the corner of Hanson Street, past the school, then turning the corner to head north anti-clockwise around the block to Clipstone Street and past the Fitzroy Arms pub.

I’ve not been able to find further photographs on the London Picture Archive showing the rest of Clipstone Street or the section along Hanson Street to complete the historical and virtual circular walk around the Cavendish block. But a Getty image from 1965 of children playing on a wall on the corner of Great Titchfield Street and Clipstone Street gives a view of some of the buildings between Cleveland Street and Hanson Street, along with neighbouring buildings (also now demolished) west of Hanson Street.

Embed from Getty Images

Those buildings at the corner of Clipstone Street and Hanson Street (visible above) were originally built in the early- and mid- 20th century and had replaced houses from the 1770s.

Turning the corner, Latimer House, a brick building with steel-framed windows, which fronts onto Hanson Street was constructed in 1938 to designs by Seth-Smith, Monro and Matthew. Again it was built in place of houses originally put up in the 1770s.

Latimer was constructed to house boys from disadvantaged London homes who had boarded at Kingham Hill School, Oxfordshire, and were later brought back to learn trades in London. “It replaced a smaller hostel in Fitzroy Square employed for the same purposes by Kingham Hill’s founder, C E Baring Young, from 1894,” states the Survey.

The University plans to demolish the building and construct a new student facility in its place.

The Survey dedicates a whole chapter to the University of Westminster. Built in the 1960s the New Cavendish Street concrete campus was funded and managed by the London County Council for the Regent Street Polytechnic, as it was called at the time.

The Clipstone School on the site had changed hands before the 1960s and was being used as an extension of the Barratt Street Technical College. The site of the school was chosen but the LCC also wanted to acquire the neighbouring residential and commercial buildings on the site to make the campus big enough to suit the Polytechnic’s needs.

“Before the project could start, a public enquiry had to be held to justify the compulsory purchase of the extra buildings round the school and the change of use for a block which had been zoned for residential development,” states the Survey.

Against the development were the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, in the shape of Sir Keith Joseph and Dame Evelyn Sharp who were “fighting for their housing empire”. The project went to enquiry in February 1964 with the LCC arguing that the Polytechnic campus was “a project of national and even international importance”.

J D Beardmore and Co, a firm of architectural ironmongers (which can be seen in one of the photos above) in Cleveland Street, were not happy as they had a couple of years earlier been turfed out of premises on the other side of the street due to the Post Office Tower development. Space also had to be found on the site for a replacement for the Fitzroy Arms pub on Clipstone Street.

The Science and Engineering department at 115 New Cavendish Street was built between 1966-1970 to the designs of Lyons, Israel, Ellis and Partners. It opened as one of the many campuses under the new name of the Polytechnic of Central London.

In 1993, the University bought the Edwardian and later 20th century commercial buildings Medway and Medford Houses on the corner of Clipstone and Hanson Street. These were later pulled down to create an extension to the science and technology department. The new Copland Building, named after the university’s Vice-Chancellor, was completed in 2005 to a design by architects Rock Townsend.

The current proposals by the University of Westminster to demolish Latimer House mark yet another stage of change on a site that was first dug out of open fields to create houses and workshops, then a school, and finally into a higher education institution. All during a period of less than 260 years.

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