Manchester House
Names
- Manchester House
Street/Area/District
- Channel Row
Maps & Views
Descriptions
from A New View of London, by Edward Hatton (1708)
Manchester House, in Channel Row, now Tenements.
from A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, by John Strype (1720)
[Manchester House.] Overagainst this [Derby] House was another fair House belonging to Henry Clinton, Earl of Lincoln; also another large House belonging to the Mountagues, lately built into a very fine Court, which hath a handsome Free-stone Pavement, and good Houses well inhabited, and bears the Name of Manchester Court, very pleasant towards the Thames.
from London Past and Present: Its History, Associations, and Traditions, by Henry Benjamin Wheatley and Peter Cunningham (1891)
Manchester House and Manchester Buildings, Canon Row, Westminster.
Over against this house [Derby House] was another fair house belonging to Henry Clinton, Earl of Lincoln; also another large house belonging to the Montagues [Earls of Manchester] lately built into a very fine Court, which hath a handsome freestone pavement, and good houses well inhabited, and bears the name of Manchester Court, very pleasant towards the Thames.—Strype, B. vi. p. 63.
It was still called Manchester Court by Dodsley in 1761, but a stone let into the corner house bore the inscription "Manchester Buildings, 1756," so that for some years probably buildings and courts were used indiscriminately for what was really a row of houses.
Bishop Nicholson, author of the Historical Library, was living here in 1708–1709.4 Colonel Barré writes to Lord Chatham from "Manchester Buildings, January 22, 1771;" and James Macpherson (Ossian) was living here in 1779. Every lodging in Manchester Buildings was, during Lord Melbourne's administration (1835–1841), let, it was said, to the members of Daniel O'Connell's "tail." Thurtell, executed for the murder of Mr. Weare [see Lyon's Inn], had a gambling-house in these buildings. The last house of Manchester Buildings—it stood for some time the solitary relic—has now disappeared. The buildings as they were have been sketched by a great artist.
Within the precincts of the ancient city of Westminster, and within half a quarter of a mile of its ancient sanctuary, is a narrow and dirty region, the sanctuary of the smaller members of Parliament in modem days. It is all comprised in one street of gloomy lodging-houses, from whose windows in vacation time there frown long melancholy rows of bills, which say as plainly as did the countenances of their occupiers, ranged on ministerial and opposition benches in the session which slumbers with its fathers, "To Let, To Let." In busier periods of the year these bills disappear, and the rooms swarm with legislators. There are legislators in the parlours, in the first floor, in the second, in the third, in the garrets; the small apartments reek with the breath of deputations and delegates. In damp weather the place is rendered close by the steams of moist Acts of Parliament and frowsy petitions; general post-men grow faint as they enter its infected limits, and shabby figures in quest of of franks, flit restlessly to and fro like the troubled ghosts of Complete Letter Writers departed. This is Manchester Buildings.—Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, chap. xvi.