Little Wild Street

Names

  • New Weld Street
  • Little Wild Street
  • Keeley Street

Street/Area/District

  • Little Wild Street

Maps & Views

Descriptions

from A Topographical Dictionary of London and Its Environs, by James Elmes (1831)

Wild-St., Little, is the second turning on the left hand in the preceding [Great Wild Street].

from Lockie's Topography of London, by John Lockie (1810)

Wild-Street (Little),—the second on the L. in the last, from 48, Great Queen-st.

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

Wild Street (Little). [See Wild House.] In the Baptist Chapel in this street, between Nos. 23 and 24 (now a mission hall), a sermon was annually preached commemorative of the great storm of 1703—the storm celebrated by Addison in his poem of "The Campaign."

from Survey of London: Volume 5, St. Giles-in-The-Fields, Pt. II, ed. W. Edward Riley & Laurence Gomme (London County Council; British History Online) (1914)

Little Wild Street was formed about 1690, for a deed,1 dated 1st September in that year, refers to a "toft, peece or parcell of ground, being parcell of the garden late belonging to Weld House in or near Weld Streete ... abutting towards the south to a new streete or passage of thirty foote in breadth there made or intended to be made, to lead out of Weld Streete towards Duke Streete [Sardinia Street] and the arch in Great Lincolne's Inn Fields."

Plate 34 shows the south side of the street in 1906. The tenement houses were probably some of the original houses erected about 1690, and their effect is charming.

The name of the street was altered in 1905 to Keeley Street.

On Plate 15 is a drawing showing the frieze of an 18th-century deal mantelpiece now on loan at the London Museum.

The house [No. 16] has recently been demolished.


1 Indenture between Isaac Foxcroft and others and Hugh Jones (in possession of the London County Council).