Among these Suburbian Territories, in the way /^    towards   Tyburn,"    wrote   Strype   in   1720, /-^ "there are certain new and splendid Build-"*~ -^- ings, called, in Honour of his present Majesty, Hanover Square : Some finished, and some erecting; consisting of many complete, noble Houses. One whereof is taking by my Lord Cowper, late Lord High Chancellor of England. And it is reported, that the common Place of Execution of Malefactors at Tyburn, shall be appointed elsewhere . . . . ; for the removing any Inconveniences or Annoyances, that might thereby be occasioned to that Square, or the Houses thereabouts." And Appletree in his journal in 1725 made the entry : " I went away towards Hyde Park, being told of a fine avenue made to the east side of the park, fine gates and a large Visa, or opening, from the new squares called Hanover Square, etc        In the town I passed an amazing scene of new foundations, not of houses only, but as I might say of new cities, new towns, new squares, and fine buildings, the like of which no city, no town, nay no place in the world can show ; nor is it possible to judge where or when they will make an end or stop of building." ompletion of the district between Oxford Street and rTHv the connection with Oxford Street of the recently Grosvenor and Golden Squares, as well as the new ver Square, is thus recorded.    Park Lane, still known as  Tyburn Lane  in   1772, had its present name in  1795.

The last execution at Tyburn Gallows took place in 1783. On an open space called Brookfields, bounded in 1772, when probably its dimensions had been narrowed, by Curzon Street on the north, Half Moon Street on the east, and Tyburn Lane on the west,

the fair called May Fair, which once had been held by the abbot of Westminster, took place annually during the first fortnight in May throughout most of the century. As the town advanced it lost its ancient rustic character. " I wish you had been at May Fair," wrote Brian Fairfax in 1701, " where the rope-dancing would have recompensed your labour. All the nobility in town were there; and I am sure that even you, at your years, must have had your youthful wishes to have beheld the beauty, shape and activity of Lady Mary when she danced. Pray ask my lord Fairfax after her, who, though not the only lord by twenty, was every night an admirer of her while the fair lasted. There was the city of Amsterdam, well worth your seeing ; every street, every individual house was carved in wood, in exact proportion one to another; the Stadthouse was as big as your hand    Here was a boy to be seen that within one of his eyes had DEUS MEUS in capital letters, as GULIELMUS is on half-a-crown."    All plays, shews, gamings, music meetings, or other disorderly assemblies " were forbidden at the fair in 1709. It is said to have been finally abolished by the instrumentality o the Lord Coventry who died in 1809, and who, in his house at the corner of Engine Street, now Brick Street, and aldermen who had distinguished themselves during the incident; and in May the statue of Beckford was erected in the Guildhall. The city in 1773 again supported Wilkes’s claim to a seat in the House of Commons, and the Common Hall again petitioned the king for redress of grievances and a dissolution of parliament. In 1774 Wilkes was elected mayor, and the mob drew him through the streets in his coach. The obelisk in his honour was set up at the foot of Ludgate Hill in the next year. In 1777 his creditors petitioned the Court of Common Council for payment of the debts which he had contracted during his mayoralty; and the Council, in consequence, deliberated on the advisability of allowing him £500 a year for his services to public liberty, but decided against such liberality for fear of the precedent which might be created. In 1779 Wilkes was elected chamberlain of the city.

In this manner the city upheld ancient traditions. She did not however command the respect which once had been paid to her. Her remonstrances were received rather peevishly and condemned as " indecent." Her attitude produced some uneasiness and had some influence on politicians, since it involved the disorder of a large class of the people. But the key to power had been lost; London could no longer force her voice upon councils of state. Those days were past in which the English government depended on the citizen merchants. The organization of the finance of the kingdom had made it impossible for London ever again to arbitrate between warring parties in the nation. Therefore in the eighteenth century the politics of the city had come to be matters of secondary interest.
The episode of Wilkes illustrates the extent to which the Court of Common Hall had assumed a share in the function .j the opinion of the city, formerly expressed only °f ^Common Council. The Common Hall had arrogated bh t right to themselves at first in a spirit of rivalry; but
hei/tenure of it was practically established after 1769. They to have based their claim on the circumstance of their 1 tion of the parliamentary representatives of the city. They were handicapped, however, in their activity by their dependence for a summons on the mayor; and repeated attempts made by them in the late eighteenth century to compel him to call them together were unsuccessful. A test case as to whether, on the other hand, a liveryman were obliged to obey the mayoral summons to a Common Hall was brought forward in 1773, and the opinion of the recorder of the city supported its binding force. Two years later, however, this judgment was reversed, and from that date the attendance of liverymen has been optional.

Piccadilly,  found   himself   disturbed   by   the    " unceasing uproar, night and day," during fair time. The project of building on the north side of Oxford Street was formed about the year 1715. In 1717 or 1718 Cavendish Square and several adjoining streets were laid out; and before 1730 Henrietta Street, Vere Street, Holies Street Margaret Street, Cavendish Street, Welbeck Street, Wimpole Street, Princes Street, Bolsover Street, John Street, and Market Street had come into existence. Lower Harley Street, Wigmore Street and Mortimer Street were planned at much the same time. A market called the Oxford Market was opened in 1731, and had a site between Oxford Street and Castle Street. Oxford Street was so called before 1729, at which date the row of houses along its north side had been completed.

There were yet green fields on the north side of that part of Oxford Street which was still known as the Tyburn Road, which intervened between Marylebone Lane, now Marylebone High Street, and the present site of Marble Arch, and also to the north of Cavendish Square, towards Marylebone village. In 1764, however, the building of Portman Square was begun, and was completed within about twenty years. Portman Street, Orchard Street, and Little Duke Street, with other streets about the square, date from the same time. Manchester Square was building in 1773. It was at first called Queen Anne’s Square, but was eventually named after Manchester House, afterwards Hertford House, which was completed in 1788. The brothers Adam, about the year 1778, designed Portland Place, so called after the ground landlord of this and the surrounding property. Its great width is due to the fact that, by a clause in the lease, any interruption of the view from the " grand house," lately erected by Lord
 
which stood where is now the Langham Hotel, was h’dden     About the year 1774 the crescent of Cumberland at first intended for a circus, was made; and Upper Berkeley Street, Upper Seymour Street, and others in the o inity  had  been  constructed  before   1792.     The   stone-fronted houses on the north and east sides of Fitzroy Square were built by the Adams.    The north side dates only from
1825.
The ground on which Beaumont Street, Devonshire Street and Devonshire Place now stand was a pleasure garden, the Marylebone Gardens, which Pepys visited in 1668 and found " a pretty place." Bowling greens, fireworks, music, vocal and instrumental, taverns, fruit tarts and other refreshments for sale, lectures, exhibitions of sword play, and a medicinal spring were some of the varied attractions which made the place fashionable. As however it came to be less remote from the town it lost its vogue, and in 1778 it was finally suppressed. The site was let to builders, and Devonshire Street, Devonshire Place and Weymouth Street appear on maps of 1792.    Beaumont Street was built before 1795.
In the last forty years of the eighteenth century a great increase of buildings took place in the neighbourhood of Tottenham Court Road, which assumed its present character of a populous street. There is no evidence that it ever was patronised by the quality. "Notwithstanding Tottenham Court Road was so infested by the lowest order," says a writer in 1773, "who kept what they called a Gooseberry Fair, it was famous at certain times of the year, particularly in summer, for its booths of regular theatrical performers, who deserted the empty benches of Drury Lane Theatre, under the mismanagement of Mr. Fleetwood, and condescended to admit the audience at sixpence each."
Bloomsbury was still a fashionable district. Lord Eldon lived from 1791 to 1804 at Number 42, Gower Street. " He could look over the fields … as far as Hampstead and Highgate, and had a garden with excellent vegetables, and even peaches."

In 1771 a rather captious critic published some observations on the "so-much-vaunted  squares"  of the West  End of London.

" Let us begin with Grosvenor Square, which is generally held out as a pattern of perfection in its kind. It is doubtless spacious, regular, and well-built ; but how is this spaciousness occupied ? A clumsy rail, with lumps of brick for piers to support it, at the distance of every two or three yards, incloses nearly the whole area, intercepting almost entirely the view of the sides, and leaving the passage round it as narrow as most streets, with the additional disadvantage at night of being totally dark on one hand. The middle is filled up with bushes and dwarf trees, through which a statue peeps, like a piece of gilt gingerbread in a greengrocer’s stall.

" Cavendish Square next claims our regard : the apparent intention here was to excite pastoral ideas in the mind; and this is endeavoured to be effected by cooping up a few frightened sheep within a wooden paling ;l which, were it not for their sooty fleeces and meagre carcases, would be more apt to give the idea of a butcher’s pen,’ passimque videbant lautis balare carinis.’

To see the poor things starting at every coach, and hurrying round and round their  narrow  bounds,  requires  a warm 1 The statue of the Duke of Cumberland replaced the sheep soon after this date. fination indeed to convert the scene into that of flocks on" the fields, with all the concomitant ideas of innocence and a pastoral life. . . "As to Hanover Square, I do not know what to make fit     It is neither open nor inclosed.    Every convenience is railed out and every nuisance railed in.    Carriages have a narrow ill-paved street to pass round it, and the middle has the  air of a cow-yard, where blackguards assemble in the winter, to play at hussle-cap, up to the ankles in dirt.    This is the more to be  regretted, as  the square in question is susceptible of improvement at a small expense.    The buildings are neat and uniform.    The street from Oxford Road falls with a gentle descent into the middle of the upper side, while, right opposite, George Street retires, converging to a point, which has a very picturesque effect; and the portico of St. George s church, seen in profile, enriches and beautifies the whole.

" Red Lion Square, elegantly so called, doubtless from some alehouse formerly at the corner, has a very different effect on the mind.    It does not make us laugh, but it makes us cry. I am sure I never go into it without thinking of my latter end.    The rough  sod that  ‘ heaves in many a mouldering heap,’ the dreary length of the sides, with the four watch-houses, like so many family vaults, at the corners, and the naked obelisk that springs from amidst the rank grass, like the sad monument of a disconsolate widow for the loss of er first husband, form altogether a ‘ memento mori,’ more Powerful  to  me  than   a  death’s  head and   cross  marrow ones; and were but the parson’s bull to be seen bellowing e gate, the idea of a country churchvard in my mind w°uld be complete."
to  St.  James’s   Square,   however,   the  author  is   of opinion that it " though far from perfect in that style, and altogether uncompleted on one side, still strikes the mind . . . with something of more ease and propriety than anv square in London. You are not confined in your space o your eye takes in the whole compass at one glance, and the water in the middle seems placed there for ornament and use."

But he finds all the squares " more or less tinctured with the same absurdity, an awkward imitation of the country amid the smoke and bustle of the town." " Yet," he allows " one is almost disposed to excuse Lincoln’s Inn Square. The vast extent of the field, still further extended by the proximity of the gardens, the lofty trees in prospect, the noble piece of water in the middle, all conspire to create an illusion, and we feel ourselves as it were fairly beguiled into the country, in the very centre of business and care. That of which I chiefly complain is the attempt to introduce rural ideas where there is not the least probability of attaining the ends. The royal parks adjoining to London by no means fall under this censure. These, with the many delightful fields which skirt this capital, render it unrivalled in situation; and, what is peculiar, they are all within the reach, and open to the health and amusement, of the inhabitants : a circumstance which renders the mock parks in the middle of the town still more unnecessary and absurd."

With this view as to the absurdity of the green squares of Bloomsbury and the West End, later generations have not concurred. " Dwarf trees " have grown lofty; their refreshment has been very grateful as gradually the " delightful fields " around London have receded. It has been proved more and more how fitly trees and lawns may be impropriated by the planner of a town. The same critic makes other remarks on the improvements recent in his days : " Our streets are now wide, straight and commodious; and lthou^h neatness, more than magnificence, seems to be the characteristic of the buildings, they do not fail on the whole to produce a grand effect. . . We have in Oxford Road the outlines of the noblest street in Europe. In length, width and straightness, it surpasses everything of its kind, and requires only to be adorned with ‘ gorgeous palaces and solemn temples,’ like the Corso at Rome or the Strada Nuovo at Genoa, to eclipse them both in fame. Nor is it arrogance to expect this: a passion for building in town seems to arise among the nobility at present; how many handsome structures then, may there not be erected along those sides, where at present there are only stables and timber-yards! The new pavement, which goes on with rapidity, sets this street in a new point of view. Already there is begun in it one public edifice1 of bold and elegant design.

"On a supposition then that men of rank and fortune should hereafter be induced to rear up their mansions in Oxford Road, it may not be presumptuous to hint at some errors which have been too commonly adopted in fabrics of that sort. To such a gateway with a spacious court within is both stately and commodious; but the front to the street should still present something that intimates a relation to the society in which you live ; a dead wall of twenty or thirty feet high, run up in the face of your neighbours, can only inspire horror and dislike. I am sorry upon this subject to instance Burlington House.    How many are there, who The Pantheon on the south side of Oxford Road was opened in 1772, and is described by Northouck (1772) as " a superb building . . . dedicated to the nocturnal revels of the British nobility." It was noted for masquerades.

lately erected by Mr. Tuffnell in Cavendish Square, are fine examples; as is also that of Mr. Anson, in St. James’s Square.1 When once this last is completed according to the plan the public will be more able to do justice to the classic taste which directed it."

The foregoing extract gives a clear idea of architectural taste in the eighteenth century. It explains also the manner of the growth of that which Fielding calls "the polite end of the town." The great men of the land were still held by the craze for building, and vied with each other in the erection of town houses. Architecture was almost entirely domestic and ecclesiastical; tradesmen and merchants were content with unassuming shops and counting-houses ; public 3 offices were comparatively insignificant.

There are some other great houses of the period which deserve notice.     Arlington House  passed  to Isabella, the I only child of the first earl of Arlington, who by her marriage became Duchess of Grafton.    She sold it to John Sheffield, -| Marquess  of Normanby,   afterwards Duke of Buckingham, J and he in 1703 rebuilt it.

" A princely palace on that space does rise, Where Sedley’s noble muse found mulberries."
The new house stood within a courtyard, but its situation by the park, and the fact that it was separated from it only by railings, through which a playing fountain could be seen, exonerated it from the censure applied to Bingley House. It appears to have been a stately mansion worthy of its beautiful 1 Lichfield House, No. 15 St. James’s Square, rebuilt about 1766 when it was acquired by Thomas Anson, M.P. for Lichfield, and sold in 1856 by the Anson family to the Clerical, Medical, and General Life Assurance Society, the present possessors.
 
Buckingham, in his own description of his house, 51 U ,    0f " a wilderness full of blackbirds and nightingales" ..Ap windows of a book-closet, and " a wall, covered beneath tne wu    ^ … roses and jessamine    low to admit the view of a adow full of cattle just under it";   but he had regrets -hich in his age, so contemptuous of past taste, were strange.

" I am oftener missing," he says, " a pretty gallery in the old house I pulled down, than pleased with a salon which I built in its stead, tho’ a thousand times better in all manner of respects."

Buckingham House was inherited in 1743 by John, Lord Hervey, and, after his death in the same year, by the duke’s natural son, Sir Charles Sheffield. From him, in 1762, it was bought by George III., and in 1775 it was settled on Queen Charlotte in lieu of Somerset House, which had been granted to her in 1763. It came to be known as the Queen’s House, and in it all the king’s children, except George IV., were born. The additions and demolitions through which George IV. and William IV. replaced it by the ugly Buckingham Palace were begun in 1825.

Marlborough House was designed by Wren in 1709-10 for the great duke of Marlborough, and had for site part of St. James’s Park. The famous duchess lived there until her death in 1744. The house became a crown possession in 1817.

In 1709 Henry Boyle, Baron Carlton, received a lease of parcel of the Royal Garden near St. James’s Palace, and all that the woodland, or wilderness adjoining to the said garden," and on this site built Carlton House. It was inherited by his nephew, the third earl of Burlington, in J725, and sold in 1732 to Frederic, Prince of Wales. Until 1772 it was the residence of the dowager princess of Wales ;
and in 1783 it was repaired and beautified for the reception of the prince of Wales who became George IV. It Was demolished in 1835. It stood where is now the opening between the York Column and the lower end of Regent Street.

Berkeley House was burnt in 1733, and replaced by Devonshire House. Lanesborough House, at Hyde Park Corner was the residence of James, Lord Lanesborough, who died in 1724, and who inscribed over his door, " It is my delight to be Both in the town and country."

It became in 1733 an infirmary, and the site is now occupied by St. George’s Hospital.    Chesterfield House, at the June- > tion of Curzon Street and South Audley Street, was built for  the  famed  author of the Letters, who lived in it after 1749, and who made Stanhope Street to connect his house with  Park Lane.     It was occupied by successive earls of Chesterfield until 1849, and bought by Mr. Magniac in 1889. | Burlington   House   was  entirely remodelled  in   the  early eighteenth century; its brick walls were coated with stone; the great gate and the street wall were erected.    At the extinction of the Burlington earldom in 1753, it accrued to the Cavendish family, and was sold to the crown in  1854. Apsley   House,   at   Hyde   Park  Corner, was built by the second Lord Bathurst, Lord Chancellor, who died in i794> and was originally of red brick.   It was settled by the nation in   1820   on   the   duke   of   Wellington,   and   subsequently underwent considerable alteration.
The Horse Guards dates from the eighteenth century, as do some public offices, the old Treasury, which fronted on the Horse Guards Parade, the  Admiralty,  "a most  ugly
 
d’fice, and deservedly veiled [about 1760] by Mr. Adam’s handsome screen."1 In 1753 the will of Sir Hans Sloane bled the institution of the British Museum in Montague House in Bloomsbury. The old house was entirely removed to give place to buildings more suitable to the new purpose between 1840 and 1849. An important event in the topographical history of London was the building, under an act passed in 1736, of Westminster Bridge. Hitherto only London Bridge had connected the city and the Surrey sides of the river. From the bridges of the eighteenth century, unencumbered by buildings, the whole city could be contemplated. The critic of 1772 had praise for the view, from Blackfriars Bridge, of the amphitheatre which reaches from Westminster to the Tower. On Westminster Bridge, in September, 1803, Wordsworth wrote his wonderful sonnet.

" Earth has not anything to show more fair : Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty : This City now doth like a garment wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill; Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep ! The river glideth at his own sweet will; Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still! "
There was much talk of embanking the river, but little was done in this century towards the realization of the project. The brothers Adam, early in the reign of George III., constructed Adelphi Terrace and the fine Adelphi Buildings, so 1 Horace Walpole.

called after them, which stand on the site of Durham House. The architects are again commemorated in Adam Street, and in the adjoining streets which bear their Christian names, John, Robert, James and William. " The works carrying on amid the antient ruins of Durham Yard," wrote the author of 1771 already quoted, " is a sample of what may be done in that way; and from the terrace of that stately pile we can best judge of the effect of so noble an object as the Thames properly displayed." But the citizens were less appreciative, for they held that the buildings con-.i stituted an encroachment on the rights of conservancy held over the river by the corporation.

" ‘ Four Scotchmen, by the name of Adams, Who keep their coaches and their madams,’ Quoth John, in sulky mood, to Thomas, ‘ Have stole the very river from us!’ "
Garrick lived at Number 5, now Number 4, Adelphi Buildings, from 1772 until his death in 1779.
Another beginning of embankment was made after the Act of parliament which gave Somerset House to the queen had been repealed in 1775. The Adams then planned the terrace elevation on which modern Somerset House stands. The building was at once devoted to public uses.

An Act of parliament for the paving, cleansing, and lighting of West London, by commissioners whose expenditure should be met by rates, was passed in 1761.

Such was at the close of the eighteenth century London west of the city. So much of it has since been intact that, to picture it, it is necessary only to eliminate the obvious results of years and of modern invention. To the north and the east of the liberties and on the Surrey side of the river there were also extensions, less in size, made by the meaner which humbler persons had founded.    It is con-bul1. ingt0   ive an account of them in a later chapter, when Vem6v,-=tnrv can be continued to the present time.    But two their nistoiy    t    t v,   of London had so close a connection with the lile ot ^e’town in the eighteenth century that it is fitting to notice them here.

South of the way to Uxbridge, now the Bayswater Road, West London was bounded by Hyde Park.    Beyond was Kensington parish, which included the hamlets of Brompton, Earl’s Court and the Gravel Pits, and Kensington village, and the manors of Earl’s Court and Notting or Nutting-barnes.    Holland House was built in 1607 by Sir Walter Cope, and inherited by his son-in-law, the Earl of Holland. It was altered by Inigo Jones, and the internal decorations were designed by Francis Cheyne.    Campden  House  was erected about 1612 by Sir Baptist Hicks, who in 1628 became Viscount Campden.    In 1691 it was let to the Princess of Denmark, afterwards Queen Anne, who lived in it for some years with her son, the little duke of Gloucester.     Afterwards it underwent several changes of ownership, and in 1795 was " an eminent boarding school for young ladies." Kensington Palace was sold to William III. by the second earl of Nottingham, and was a frequent residence of William and Mary, Anne, George I. and George II., but was forsaken by the royal family in the reign of George III.    The palace gardens  consisted  originally of only twenty-six acres, but Queen Anne added to them other thirty, laid out by her gardener ; and Queen Caroline, who included in them nearly three hundred acres which had previously been part of Hyde park, is the real   founder  of the gardens  as  they  are at present.    " The broad walk," wrote Lysons in 1795, "which extends from   the   palace   along   the   south   side   of  the gardens,1 is  in  the  spring a very fashionable  promenade especially on Sunday mornings."

In the eighteenth century various eminent persons, including Bernard Lens, the miniature painter, and, for a time, Swift lived in Kensington. But an even more popular place with those who wished to enjoy the country, together with an easy access to London, was Chelsea. There were in 1705 only some three hundred houses in Chelsea parish; but within ninety years they were increased to more than a thousand. The village in 1795 extended " almost to Hyde Park corner, including a considerable part of Knights-bridge," but it was separated from Westminster by the still rural district of Belgravia and Pimlico.
In modern street names the ownership of Chelsea, as of some other London properties, is chronicled. In 1712 Sir Hans Sloane, president of the Royal Society and of the College of Physicians, bought the manor from William, Lord Cheyne. He bequeathed it, at his death in 1752, to his two daughters, Elizabeth and Sarah, of whom Elizabeth married Lord Cadogan. The subsequent extinction of the line of Sarah caused the reversion of the whole estate to the Cadogan family.

The house in which Sir Thomas More had once dwelt, and which was called Beaufort House, because from 1682 until 1714 it was a residence of the family of the duke of Beaufort, was also acquired by Sir Hans Sloane, and was demolished by him in 1740.    It stood at the north end of Beaufort Row.
Soon after the Revolution some persons of fashion settled in Chelsea.    Among them was a very modish lady in reduced circumstances,  the  duchesse de  Mazarin,  once  a famous beauty of the court of Charles II., who felt severely the 1 Not to be confused with the present Broad Walk.
 
Of the pension of £4,000 allowed to her by that king. t her economies entailed no dulness. It is said that her eSts were wont to leave money under their plates to pay f r the entertainment she gave them. In any case her house waS "the constant resort of people of fashion, who were ttracted by her conversaziones, her basset table," and her concerts, at which dramatic works, written and set to music by St. Evremond, were frequently performed. In Anne’s reign, Felton Gerrard, last Earl of Macclesfield, John Vau°-han, last Earl of Carbery, and Edward Fowler, Bishop of Gloucester, lived in Chelsea. But the most famous of all inhabitants of the place is the wicked old Lady Castlewood. When Harry Esmond came out of Newgate prison her ladyship’s fellow " in the orange-tawny livery with the blue lace and facings" was in waiting, and from the banks of the Thames near Fleet Conduit called a pair of oars. "They rowed up at length to the pretty village of Chelsea, where the nobility have many handsome country houses; and so came to my Lady Viscountess’s house-a cheerful new house in the row facing the river, with a handsome garden behind it, and a pleasant look-out both towards Surrey and Kensington."

In 1714 or 1715 Steele was living at Chelsea. In 1722 Walpole acquired a house and garden by the riverside. He made considerable improvements, and built in the garden, in accordance with the latest and most approved taste, a grotto, and also an octagonal summer-house and a large greenhouse, in which he had a fine collection of exotics. " One summer, when Queen Caroline was regent during the king’s absence in Germany, her Majesty honoured Lady Walpole with her Presence at a dinner in this greenhouse, which was elegantly fitted,up for the occasion, and hung with some of the finest of those  pictures  which   afterwards   formed   part   of the Houghton collection."

The earl of Huntingdon, who died in 1746, built on the river bank, near the western extremity of the parish, an " elegant villa." It was inhabited in 1795 by Lord Cremorrie and was distinguished by a Jarvis window. Lord Cremorne kept in this house his collection of Flemish and Italian masters. His neighbour was Lady Mary Coke. Others of the great who had houses in Chelsea in the eighteenth century were Lord Oxford, from 1703 to 1707, Lady Bristol in 1705, the duchesses of Buccleugh, Monmouth, and Hamilton, the duke of Kent, from 1714 to 1715, and the duchess of Ormond, from 1720 to 1733. In the last twenty years of the century there was much building in the district called Hans Town. " The principal street," wrote Lysons in 1795, " takes its name from the Sloane family, and is about six furlongs in length ; it contains 160 houses, the buildings, for the most part, occupying only the west side; behind this street is a spacious and handsome square, as yet unfinished."