Cavendish Square and Harley Street
Why is it significant?
Stand in Cavendish Square and look at the north side, where a stone bridge links two Georgian houses across a narrow mews. On it hangs a bronze Madonna and Child by Jacob Epstein, made in the early 1950s for the Catholic convent that then occupied the buildings.
Key Facts
| Place | Cavendish Square and Harley Street |
|---|---|
| Address | 20 Cavendish Square, London W1G 0RN, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.51630, -0.14460 |
| Part of Walk | From 221B to Wimpole Street: Sherlock Holmes, Dickens and the Beatles in Marylebone, London |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand in Cavendish Square and look at the north side, where a stone bridge links two Georgian houses across a narrow mews. On it hangs a bronze Madonna and Child by Jacob Epstein, made in the early 1950s for the Catholic convent that then occupied the buildings. A Jewish sculptor, a convent of nuns, and one of the most tender religious images in London.
The square was laid out from 1717 by Edward Harley, who had married the great heiress Henrietta Cavendish-Holles, and the whole district reads like their family tree. Harley Street, Henrietta Place, Holles Street, Wimpole Street, named after the family's country house in Cambridgeshire. And in Holles Street, just south of the square, Lord Byron was born in 1788.
In the middle of the gardens there is a stone plinth with nothing on it. From 1770 it carried a gilded equestrian statue of the Duke of Cumberland, known in Scotland as Butcher Cumberland for the brutal suppression of the Highlands after the Battle of Culloden in 1746. In 1868 the statue was taken down, and the plinth stayed empty, an absence more eloquent than the statue had ever been. In 2012 a Korean artist, Meekyoung Shin, placed a replica of the duke there carved in soap, designed to wear away in the London rain.
Now look up Harley Street, running north from the square. Doctors began moving into its big, handsome houses in the nineteenth century, drawn by space and wealthy patients, and the name became shorthand for private medicine. A few blocks up, in 1853, Florence Nightingale ran a small hospital for sick gentlewomen, the job she left the following year to take her nurses to the Crimean War.
Doctors, poets, a duke made of soap... this square is full of stories. Walk north up Harley Street for a block or two, then step one street west into Wimpole Street, where a poet waited behind her curtains and, a century later, a Beatle woke up with a melody in his head.