Bolton Street

Names

  • Bolton Street

Street/Area/District

  • Bolton Street

Maps & Views

Descriptions

from London Past and Present: Its History, Associations, and Traditions, by Henry Benjamin Wheatley and Peter Cunningham (1891)

Bolton Street, Piccadilly, the second turning west of Devonshire House; at the top is Bolton Row. It was built circ. 1699,5 and described in 1708 as "the most westerly Street in London, between the road to Knightsbridge, south, and the Fields, north."1 Eminent Inhabitant.—The celebrated Earl of Peterborough, from 1710 to I724.2

I lie at my Lord Peterborough's, in Bolton Street, where any commands of your's will reach me.—Pope, Works, ed. Roscoe, vol. vii. p. 126.
The extraordinary Choice Collection [of Mr. Streeton late Serjeant Painter] consisting of models, figures, etc. ... will be sold by Auction on the 5th Inst. at 3 in the afternoon, at his late dwelling-house Next Bolton Street in Hide Park Road.—Advertisement in Spectator of October 2, 1711 (No. 185).

About 1715 Pope writes to Martha and Theresa Blount as the "Young Ladies in Bolton Street." George Grenville the minister (d. 1770) lived here for several years before his death. Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of St. Asaph, died here in 1778. Madame D'Arblay removed here, October 8, 1818, shortly after her husband's death. Rogers took Sir Walter Scott to visit her here, and the latter found she had not lost the power of saying pleasant things. "She told me she had wished to see two persons—myself, of course, being one, the other George Canning. This was really a compliment to be pleased with."3 Lord Melbourne lived here, and here gave his noted "little dinners." The young Pretender in his asserted visit to London in 1760 is said to have lodged in Bolton Street. Watier's Club was held in Bolton Street. Watier was cook to the Prince of Wales, under whose auspices the club was started. The dinners were unequalled in London. Mrs. Delaney was living in Bolton Row in 1753; and Mrs. Vesey gave her fashionable and literary evening parties (conversations) at her house in Bolton Row till her removal to Clarges Street in 1780.

5 Rate-books of St. Martin's.

1 Hatton, 8vo, 1708, p. 815. 
2 Rate-books of St. Martin's.
3 Diary in Lockhart's Life of Scott, chap. 72.