The Garden History Blog

The gardens at Nevern Square, Earls Court

We saw last week that although new squares continued to be built in the middle of the 19thc the design was sometimes adapted and modified, and there was sometimes criticism of both the layout itself and increasingly of the planting.

Nevertheless most squares, as Todd Longstaffe-Gowan points out,  “somehow miraculously maintained a degree of social pre-eminence regardless of the vicissitudes of fashion.”  London squares were generally still seen as   prestigious places to live, “bestowing social rank, dignity and precedence upon their inhabitants.” That meant they continued to attract the aspirant classes [sometimes known as “gentility-mongers”] and more squares were built in the later years of the century.

The Brewery, Golden Square , 1878

Yet at the same time there were  huge and growing differences  between them and some had even ceased to be residential. The social commentator Henry Mayhew, as part of  his studies of poverty and crime, tried to categorise the city’s squares in 1862.  Some were “imposing”, others “stately and gorgeous” while another group were  “intensely quiet ..and as still and desolate as cloisters.”  But it’s clear that the whole concept of the square as a social construct was changing as he dismissed a large number of others as “pretentious parvenu-like suburban squares” and wrote off more as “obsolete or used up old squares.”    What was happening and why?

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