Marylebone High Street: Dickens's Corner and the Lost Pleasure Gardens
Why is it significant?
Walk slowly down Marylebone High Street and you will feel how different it is from the ruler-straight Georgian streets around it: narrower, gently bending, lined with small shops. This was the main street of a village, long before the great landlords covered its fields with terraces.
Key Facts
| Place | Marylebone High Street: Dickens's Corner and the Lost Pleasure Gardens |
|---|---|
| Address | Marylebone High Street, London W1U 4QW, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.52030, -0.15190 |
| Part of Walk | From 221B to Wimpole Street: Sherlock Holmes, Dickens and the Beatles in Marylebone, London |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk slowly down Marylebone High Street and you will feel how different it is from the ruler-straight Georgian streets around it: narrower, gently bending, lined with small shops. This was the main street of a village, long before the great landlords covered its fields with terraces.
At the top of the street, on the corner with Marylebone Road, a carved stone frieze shows Charles Dickens surrounded by his characters. It marks the site of 1 Devonshire Terrace, where Dickens lived from 1839 to 1851, at the height of his fame. Here he wrote The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield... and, in a few feverish weeks in 1843, A Christmas Carol. Scrooge was born a few steps from where you are standing.
Across the street from the frieze, a small garden marks the site of the old parish church, pulled down in the twentieth century. Lord Byron was baptised there in 1788, and so was Horatia, the daughter of Admiral Nelson and Emma Hamilton. Francis Bacon was married there in 1606, William Hogarth set the wedding scene of A Rake's Progress inside it, and the hymn writer Charles Wesley lies buried in its old churchyard.
Further down, the eighteenth century came to play. Marylebone Gardens, open-air pleasure gardens with music, fireworks, gambling and the occasional highwayman, stood just to the east of this street until 1778. Handel's music was played there, and a well-loved story tells that the old composer, strolling with a friend, heard one of his own pieces and asked the friend's opinion of it... then cheerfully agreed that it was poor stuff.
Halfway down, look for a long Edwardian shop built for an antiquarian bookseller, with oak galleries, a skylight and stained glass, still full of books today. Then, at the bottom of the High Street, turn right along Hinde Street to Manchester Square, a quiet square where one grand house hides one of the greatest art collections ever given to the British nation.