Berners Street

Berners Street is located in the City of Westminster in the West End of London.

Berners Street runs approximately 195 metres in a northerly direction from the junction of Oxford Street and Wardour Street to join up with Mortimer Street (formerly Charles Street) and the former Middlesex Hospital (now called Fitzroy Place). The street lies in an area known as Fitzrovia and is considered historically to be in East Marylebone.

Berners Street was originally developed as a residential street by the Berners Estate in the mid-eighteenth century.

John Slater, surveyor of the Berners Estate, wrote in 1918:

"On 21st May 1738, William Berners let for ninety-nine years to Thomas Huddle the whole frontage of 655 feet to Oxford Street and 100 feet in depth (with the exception of width required for two proposed new streets - which would be the present Berners and Newman Streets and a widening of Wells Lane) at a total rent of 4s. per foot per annum. Huddle was to pull down all old buildings and to erect new ones, and Berners was to construct a sewer from Wells Lane to Rathbone Place. Huddle began to build the houses in Oxford Street at once, and apportioned there rents, the first lease for ninety-nine years being granted in 1739. The total annual rent received by the estate for the Oxford Street houses was £135 8s. until the last of the old leases fell in 1838. The sewer referred to still runs under some of the houses in Berners Street and Wells Street, but it is now disused. Between 1750 and 1763 the existing streets on the Estate were laid out: the first lease granted in Newman Street is dated 1750, in Charles Street, now called Mortimer Street, in 1759, in Castle Street and Wells Street in 1760, in Berners Street in 1763, and in Suffolk Street, now called Nassau Street, in 1764. Building must have gone on rapidly, for in 1773 there were existing sixty completed houses in Berners Street, twenty-three in Castle Street, thirty-five in Mortimer Street, exclusive of the Middlesex Hospital, ninety in Newman Street, and twenty-three in Nassau Street. Many of the houses show strongly the influence of the Brothers Adam, and some ceilings, which are very beautiful, were almost certainly from their original designs. A lease for 999 years was granted to the Middlesex Hospital in 1754"

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