St. Martin's Lane
Pat Rogers, University of South Florida
June 2026
This was one of the key arteries in what became known as the West End of London. It followed the line of a medieval track, whose character may be judged by its route between St. Martin’s in the Fields and St. Giles’ in the Fields. It was not until the sixteenth century that St. Martin’s became parochial after splitting from St. Margaret’s, Westminster. A new church was built around 1544 as the city continued to grow westwards. By the late seventeenth century this structure was decaying, in spite of some remedial work by Sir Christopher Wren, who was based locally off Whitehall. In 1680 it was claimed that the parish contained 40,000 more people than the church could hold. An inspection in 1710 showed that the walls could barely support the roof, and services were suspended in 1721. By this time plans had started to be laid for a new church to the design of James Gibbs. It was completed in 1726 at a cost of £26,000, and remains one of the most celebrated features on the skyline of central London, as well as the model for numerous edifices in colonial America.
So steep was the rise in population that new parishes were carved out of St. Martin’s at regular intervals: St. Paul’s, Covent Garden in 1660; St. James’, Piccadilly in 1685; St. Anne’s, Soho in 1686; and St. George’s, Hanover Square, in 1724. The last of these was the most important, as it contained a huge tract of land that was in the course of development to provide residences for the aristocracy and gentry. Inevitably, the population declined from a peak of around 40,000 at the beginning of the eighteenth century to 25,000 in 1801, but this disguises a gradual increase at its core. Only a handful of parishes in the City, Westminster, Middlesex, and Southwark exceeded this figure. St. Martin’s still covered a swathe of land at the heart of London with some of its richest and most civically prominent areas. These included famous landmarks of Westminster, notably the whole of Whitehall, Charing Cross, Hungerford Market, the Royal Mews, the western reaches of the Strand, the New Exchange, York Buildings, much of Drury Lane, Long Acre, part of Leicester Fields, and the Haymarket. St. Martin’s Lane was the major north-south route that linked these disparate parts of the city.
History
It had gone from a few scattered settlements at the southern end, first developed from around 1609, to a broad thoroughfare, described in John Strype’s recension of Stow’s Survey of the capital (1720) as “well inhabited, especially on the western side.” The road stretched more than a quarter of a mile from the Strand, at a point opposite the impressive bulk of Northumberland House (now long demolished), almost as far as Seven Dials. Today it follows the same slightly curved contour, but on all four directions the surrounding street pattern is considerably different from the one that residents knew three hundred years ago. The southern end of the Lane is truncated at a point just north of the parish church on one side and the churchyard opposite, which lay close to the site of the National Portrait Gallery. This change was caused by the creation of Trafalgar Square in the 1830s, with newly constructed roads including St. Martin’s Place and King William IV Street. Visitors to London’s theatreland in the twenty-first century must imagine a landscape bare of Piccadilly Circus, Regent Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, Aldwych, and Charing Cross Road.
Surrounded by such a throng of varied districts—each with links to aspects of life such as politics, government, royalty, the church, the law, the theatre and music, the book trades, general commerce, prostitution or gambling—St. Martin’s Lane managed to strike out for itself a reputation as the centre of a vibrant and distinctive subculture. It was perhaps the most cosmopolitan quarter of the town, and it harboured a large community of painters, engravers, furniture makers, artisans, and metal workers, and others engaged in arts and crafts. Both these phenomena owed a great deal to the immigrants who had settled in recent decades around Soho, on the north-west corner of the Lane. The most prominent of these were the Huguenots who had left France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and were noted among other things as silversmiths. But there were also several Italian artists and musicians, along with a sprinkling of German and Swiss practitioners. We must also remember that there was an underclass of paupers eking out a living in and around the street, a proportion of whom might end up facing settlement examinations under the Poor Law, or be destined for the workhouse on Castle Street which ran parallel with St. Martin’s Lane. Together with occasional adventurers and eccentrics, these divergent groups gave rise to a melting pot almost unique in British urban life at this date.
Earlier inhabitants had included the first Earl of Shaftesbury, the pioneering neurologist Thomas Willis, the poet Sir John Suckling, and Thomas Tenison, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was Vicar of St. Martin’s from 1680 to 1691. Bernard Lintot, publisher of important works by Alexander Pope, issued his first books from the sign of the Cross Keys in the Lane in 1698, but moved on two years later. Most of the celebrities in subsequent years lived or worked on the west side of the street, although not quite all. They included the tenor John Beard, who lived in the top house adjoining Newport Street; a neighbour, the architect James Paine, with his colleague John Gwynn as a tenant in a court behind; and another bookseller, Samuel Harding. Nearby, the writer Ambrose “Namby Pamby” Philips had a short occupancy in the early 1720s when he was serving as a justice of the peace for Westminster. Another prominent figure in the art world, the portrait painter Robert Edge Pine, lived on the corner of St. Martin’s Court, a short distance from the top of the street. A little further down was the house of the French-born physician, some said quack, John Misaubin, and nearby one occupied by the artist Francis Hayman. Further south again, in the short cul de sac named Peter’s Court lived the outstanding sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac.
On the east side of the road, there were fewer notabilities but a good number of craft works. The most notable business was that of the great cabinet maker Thomas Chippendale, who moved from Long Acre and the Strand in 1753 to take out a lease at no. 61 St. Martin’s Lane (his workshop was next door). He worked there in partnership with an upholsterer named James Rannie until 1766, and as a sole operator for a further decade, when his son Thomas took over. After his death in 1779 his body was interred at St. Martin’s church.
At the lower end on the western side lay the burial ground, and next to it the parish Round House or lock up, with its medieval-looking penal apparatus of the stocks alongside the front entrance. The building became notorious as the site of a horrible episode on 15 July 1742, described in a graphic passage by Horace Walpole:
A parcel of drunken constables took it into their heads to put the laws in execution against disorderly persons, and so took up every woman they met, until they had collected five or six and twenty, all of whom they thrust into St. Martin's Roundhouse, where they kept them all night, with doors and windows closed. The poor creatures, who could not stir or breathe, screamed as long as they had any breath left, begging at least for water; one poor wretch said she was worth eighteen-pence, and would gladly give it for a draught of water, but in vain! So well did they keep them there that in the morning four were found stifled to death, two died soon after, and a dozen more are in a shocking way…. Several of them were beggars, who from having no lodging, were necessarily found in the street, and others honest labouring women.
Some of the women were prostitutes, and there is little doubt that this was a targeted attack, mounted by “an army of constables, beadles and watchmen” (Hitchcock and Shoemaker) on the orders of the local justices. The head watchman, William Bird, was charged with murder before the celebrated magistrate, Sir Thomas De Veil, at Bow Street, and tried two months later at the Old Bailey. He was originally sentenced to death, but this was commuted to transportation for fourteen years. In April 1743 he was loaded on to a ship bound for Maryland; but, denied food and water, he died of dehydration before the crossing was completed. His offence was truly despicable, and it is usually cited as an example of the misapplication of the law by irresponsible constables under the lax control of trading justices. But the fate meted out to Bird was equally cruel.
The Academies of Art
We have seen that the associations of the area cluster principally around the development of a thriving artistic quarter, a phenomenon that was previously so unEnglish that it had to be guided in large measure by immigrant practitioners. First in St. Martin’s Lane came the academy set up by Louis Chéron and John Vanderbank, a breakaway group from the fractious St. Luke’s Academy, founded in 1711 in Great Queen Street on the other side of Drury Lane. One of the original students when the new academy arrived in the Lane in 1720 was William Hogarth, who paid a subscription of two guineas to attend drawing classes. He had just cut short of his apprenticeship to the silver engraver Ellis Gamble, based very close to Leicester Fields. The school seems to have been located in a disused meeting house in Peter’s Court, about halfway down the street, not far from the later home of Roubiliac. By 1724 the organisation had collapsed owing to financial irregularities, although the decorative painter Sir James Thornhill continued to give classes for some time at his home nearby in Covent Garden. Chéron died in 1725 and was buried at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden. The first undertaking was succeeded by the better-known St. Martin’s Lane Academy, established seemingly on the same site in 1735. This time the prime mover was Hogarth himself, now among the most famous artists of the age, who had recently been living with his wife and his father-in-law, Thornhill, in Covent Garden, but now moved to Leicester Fields, hardly more than a stone’s throw from the Lane.
In this environment of growing activity across the arts and crafts, he could draw on a large pool of talent to provide both teachers and students. His principal assistants included Francis Hayman and John Ellys. Others who participated as members of the Academy were the versatile drawing master and etcher Hubert-François Gravelot and his youthful protégé Thomas Gainsborough; Handel’s friend the versatile French artist, Joseph Goupy; the Swiss enameller George Michael Moser, besides Roubiliac. Moser ran a drawing school on the fashionable west side of the road, where his pupils included the still obscure Joshua Reynolds, who occupied “handsome apartments” before moving in 1753 a short way up the road to Newport Street. Despite Hogarth’s declining interest, the project survived until 1767 under the guidance of Hayman and Moser. Some of its functions and raison d’être were to be superseded with the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768.
Old Slaughter’s
The entire enterprise had intimate links to the coffee house set up in 1692 by Thomas Slaughter, next door to Beard’s house at the top of the street. It was known at first as Slaughter’s, and then as Old Slaughter’s, once the rival New Slaughter’s had opened in the middle of the eighteenth century a few doors down the road. Many leading artists were associated with the establishment, among them Hayman, Thomas Hudson, George Lambert, the engraver John Pine, Jonathan Richardson and Roubiliac. The most influential member of the group was Gravelot (1699–1773), as a result not just of his all round technical skills which made him the best known book illustrator of his time, but also because of his forceful yet congenial personality, reflected in his warm engagement in the frank discussions that took place at Slaughter’s. Most of Gravelot’s career in London was spent in the small enclave surrounding the northside of Covent Garden. He was a friend of the theatrical set, including David Garrick. For his part, Hogarth was able to attract into the orbit at Slaughter’s several old cronies, some of whom came from the Freemasons’ lodges that had sprung up in recent years (among them one in St. Martin’s Lane, along with those in the immediate vicinity that met in Drury Lane, Covent Garden, Charing Cross, Seven Dials, and Long Acre), from the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks, a dining/drinking club based at Covent Garden playhouse, or from the Academy of Ancient Music, a staple of concert life throughout the century that gave performances at the Crown and Anchor off the Strand.
Of course, the range of concerns which drew patrons to Old Slaughter’s did not stop at narrowly artistic matters. As in coffee houses generally, the quidnuncs discussed topics of the day. Other convivial activities went on, some related to gambling, with cards, chess and draughts among the favourite games. Among the masters who performed there was the chess champion and composer François-André Danican Philidor. Perhaps the most notable scholar among the habitués was Abraham de Moivre (1667–1754), the mathematician who carried out some of the most important work of his time on probability theory. Notoriously impoverished, he may have earned a pittance by giving lessons at Slaughter’s, as well as by advising gamblers on the odds on or against a bet. So regularly were his visits did he attend there that he had correspondents use it as his address. According to Jacob Bernoulli, he complained that he had to walk large distances round London to reach his younger pupils: we know that he taught the sons of leading aristocrats such as the Duke of Devonshire. As a result of his interests, De Moivre gained the friendship of Isaac Newton, Edmond Halley, and John Arbuthnot (the last of whom was known to enjoy playing games for small stakes, and who considered the outcome of games with dice in Of the Laws of Chance, 1692). It is possible that de Moivre managed to penetrate the not particularly hospitable entrance to Newton’s house and observatory in St. Martin’s Street—the confusingly similar name for a road running south from Leicester Square. His exact address has not been located, but he was buried in the parish church of St. Martin’s in the Fields on 1 December 1754.
De Moivre patronised another coffee house, also serving as a restaurant, which stood at the western end of Cecil Court, a short alley leading to Castle Street. This was owned by an immigrant known by the Balzacian name of Monsieur Pons, and served as a meeting place for the Huguenot community. “For their accommodation,” an old writer tells us, “Monsieur Pons established the first table d'hôte à la mode de Paris,” offering a private dining room at the back. Like many of the establishments around the Lane, it seems to have been chiefly a site of masculine sociability, although a number of able craftswomen worked in the neighbourhood. The place served other social purposes beyond eating or drinking: in 1746 tickets for a benefit performance of a dramatic entertainment at Drury Lane as an afterpiece to Molière’s The Miser could be obtained from the author at Pons’ shop.
There was also a coffee house named Tom’s in the Lane, where book auctions were held in the 1720s and early 1730s.
Departure and Arrival
Sadly, there was no guarantee of safety in the chosen home of the artistic world. There could be none, since the crowded streets in the centre of town were exposed not just to violence (as in the episode at the Roundhouse), but also to the perils of urban living, enumerated by Samule Johnson in his poem London (1738): “Here malice, rapine, accident conspire, /And now a rabble rages, now a fire; /… Here falling houses thunder on your head.” William Hogarth had learnt the truth of such accidents, the hardest way possible, in June 1736:
The Fire … broke out between 11 and 12 o'clock, at a Brandy-Shop in Cecil Court, St. Martin's Lane, and communicated itself into St. Martin's Court, and continued with great Fury for the Space of two Hours, before Water could be got to supply the Engines. His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, the Lord James Cavendish, Sir Thomas Hobby, and Mr. Cornwallis, were present; a Detachment of Foot Guards also assisted: His Royal Highness went on the Top of a House in St. Martin's-Court, to take a View of it, and then came down to direct the Engines, and animate the Firemen, &c. About 3 the Fire was got under, when about 15 Houses were destroyed, viz. 12 in St. Martin's Court, and 3 in Cecil Court, besides a great many others much damaged: John Huggins, Esq; gave 20 Guineas to the Populace, to excite them to a Diligence suitable to the melancholy Occasion: His Royal Highness likewise gave a considerable Sum of Money to the Firemen and others.
The suggestion was made that the owner of the brandy shop, an Irishwoman named Elizabeth Kelleway (or Calloway), had set fire to her own house as an act of revenge. But this was at the height of the controversy surrounding the Gin Acts, and reprisals between (mainly female) gins sellers and informers were a common occurrence, as Jessica Warner has documented. In addition, the Irish were always suspect to many Londoners. Kelleway was taken up by Sir Thomas De Veil and committed to Newgate for trial. Her fate is unknown.
A cruel side-effect of the fire was that it caused the decease of Hogarth’s mother Anne. She and a daughter were living in Cranborne Alley, which ran a little way between Leicester Fields and St. Martin’s Lane. The General Evening Post of 24 June reported her burial, attributing her death to “a Fright, occasion’d by the Fire in St. Martin’s court.” The paper added, “She was in perfect Health when the unhappy Accident broke out, and died before it could be extinguished. Since she was about seventy-four, it is rash to speculate on exactly what happened, especially in view of the fact that both the cause and the exact course of the fire remain undetermined. All we can say is that eighteenth-century houses were often fragile and flammable, and so people lived with this knowledge.
On 24 April 1764, there took place the arrival of an individual who was to become unquestionably the most distinguished resident of the Lane. He had just come from Paris and spent the previous night at the White Bear Inn, Piccadilly. Lodgings were fund above a barber’s shop, described in a letter home as ‘“at the house of Mr. [John] Cousin, haircutter in Cecil Court, St. Martin's Lane, at London.” However, his stay lasted only about a hundred days, and he was just eight years old. This was the prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, barnstorming across Europe on a lengthy tour in company with his father Leopold (author of the letter just mentioned) and his thirteen-year-old sister Nannerl, who joined him in numerus performances. It is to the credit of Leopold that, unlike many Svengalis then and later, he did not understate the ages of his infant phenomena. The Mozarts remained in England, mostly in central London. After a spell in what is now Victoria, the family moved back in August to Thrift, now Frith, Street in Soho, where they stayed for the remainder of their sojourn, covering almost twelve months. Thus the greater part of their residence in London was passed in the bustling district that surrounded the Lane: one of their last public recitals was given at Hickford’s Great Room in Brewer Street, also in the heart of Soho. Leopold had no doubt calculated that he was closer there than anywhere else to some of the people he most wished to impress: Stanley Sadie lists more than twenty individuals with whom he made contact, headed by figures such as Johann Christian Bach and Thomas Arne, and describes them as “a selection of the more cosmopolitan part of London musical life.”
In some ways this list encapsulates the history of St. Martin’s Lane throughout the century, as it absorbed the talents of a wide array of individuals, diverse in terms of their origin, background, training, interests, age and gender.
For a thoroughly researched account of Hogarth’s activities in and around Slaughter’s, see Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: High Art and Low, 1732-1750 (Rutgers University Press, 1992), Chapter 3. For the artistic community, see Vic Gatrell, The First Bohemians: Life and Art in London’s Golden Age (2013). There is an excellent account of the episode at the watchhouse involving William Bird, together with the legal proceedings, in Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, Tales from the Hanging Court (2006). For Mozart’s boyhood stay, see Stanley Sadie, Mozart: The Early Years 1756-1781 (2006), Chapter 4. Other scholars such as Ruth Halliwell and Hannah Templeton are engaged in exploring the network of family acquaintances in the capital.