Mews house

Mews is a primarily British term formerly describing a row of stables, usually with carriage houses below and living quarters above, built around a paved yard or court, or along a street, behind large city houses, such as those of London, during the 17th and 18th centuries. The word may also refer to the lane, alley or back street onto which such stables open. It is sometimes applied to rows or groups of garages or, more broadly, to a narrow passage or a confined place. Today most mews stables have been converted into dwellings.

In the Smart Growth, Traditional Neighborhood Development and New Urbanism movements, the term is used to refer to the creation of new housing with similar characteristics to the historic type: a grouping of small dwellings which front on an alley or pedestrian passage.

The word derives from the French muer, "to moult", reflecting its original function to confine hawks while they moulted. Shakespeare deploys to mew up to mean confine, coop up, or shut up in The Taming of the Shrew: "What, will you mew her up, Signor Baptista?" and also Richard III: "This day should Clarence closely be mewed up".

From 1377 onwards the king's falconry birds were kept in the King's Mews at Charing Cross. The name stuck when it became the royal stables starting in 1537 during the reign of King Henry VIII. Following its demolition in the early 19th century Trafalgar Square was built on the site. The Royal Mews relocated to the grounds of Buckingham Palace, where it remains today. The stables of St James's Palace, occupying the site where Lancaster House was later built, were also occasionally referred to as the "Royal Mews", as in John Rocque's 1740s map of London. A "mews" in the sense of a building where birds used for falconry are kept, which in turn comes from birds' cyclical loss of feathers known as 'mewing' or moulting.

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