Percy Street

Percy Street is a street in the London Borough of Camden that runs from Rathbone Street in the west to Tottenham Court Road in the east. At its western end it is joined by Rathbone Place and Charlotte Street. Nearby Percy Mews is off Rathbone Place. The street was built in the 1760s and is known for the number of artists that have lived there.

The land on which Percy Street is built was owned by Francis and William Goodge. They granted leases on the south side in 1764 and the north side in 1766. Twenty-eight houses had been completed by 1770.

The architecture of Percy Street is undistinguished. Most of the buildings are generic three-storey Georgian town houses with standard interior features. The ground floors of around half the houses on the street have been converted to retail use, and on the north side a large modern office block is situated on the corner of Tottenham Court Road. Number 21 was destroyed by bombing during the Second World War. Some of the houses have been resurfaced in concrete and had extra storeys added.

Number 1 Percy Street was the site of the White Tower restaurant, formerly the Eiffel Tower hotel and restaurant. The restaurant was taken over by Rudolf Stulik, the former chef to Lord Kitchener, in 1910 and became very popular with painters of the Vorticist movement in 1914 and was frequented by Augustus John in the 1930s. John took the young lady who became Dylan Thomas's wife to one of the Eiffel Tower Hotel rooms on an assignation before her marriage. Among its patrons were Archduke Rudolph, Madame Kharsavina, Lord Birkenhead, Chaliapin, the Duke of Gloucester, and George Bernard Shaw, as well as the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII. It was memorialised in William Roberts' painting The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel: Spring 1915 (completed 1961-2). It became the White Tower in 1943. Since then it became Bam-Bou, an Asian restaurant. Today it is the flagship venue, House of Ho, a fine dining modern Vietnamese restaurant with a sister site in Soho. In 1922 the street was home to the New Court Club where Freda Kempton met the Chinese drug dealer Brilliant Chang, a meeting which may have led to her death.

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