Strand, The (London, England); Streets -- England -- London
The associations of this part are numerous and very interesting. The
busts of the four men standing in the corners of the centre garden have
all some local connection. They are those of Hogarth, Sir Joshua
Reynolds, Sir Isaac Newton, and John Hunter. Hogarth's house was on the
east, on the site of Tenison's School, and next to it was that of John
Hunter, the famous surgeon. Sir Joshua Reynolds bought No. 47 on the
west side in 1760, and lived in it until his death. Sir Isaac Newton
lived in the little street off the south side of the square, at the back
of the big new Dental Hospital. His house is still standing, and bears a
tablet of the Society of Arts. It is quite unpretentious--a
stucco-covered building with little dormer-windows in the roof. The
great scientist came here in 1710, when he was nearly sixty, and his
fame was then world-wide. Men from all parts of Europe sought the dull
little street in order to converse with one whose power had wrought a
revolution in the methods of scientific thought. In the same house Miss
Burney afterwards lived with her father. Sir Thomas Lawrence took
apartments at No. 4, Leicester Square, in 1786, when only seventeen, but
he had already begun to exhibit at the Royal Academy. The square was for
long a favourite place of residence with foreigners, and has not even
yet lost a slightly un-English aspect.
Archbishop Tenison's School is at the south-east corner of the square.
Its founder, who was successively Bishop of Lincoln and Archbishop of
Canterbury, intended that it should counterbalance a flourishing Roman
Catholic school in the Savoy precincts. Among old boys may be mentioned
Postlethwaite, afterwards Master of St. Paul's; Charles Mathews, when
very young; Horne Tooke a former Lord Mayor of London; and Liston who
was for a time usher.
As stated above, the northern half of the square is in the parish of St.
Anne's, Soho, a parish now tenanted to a very large extent by
foreigners, chiefly French and Italians. Shaftesbury Avenue, running
diagonally through the parish, is of very recent origin.
Soho has been derived from the watchword of Monmouth at Sedgemoor,
because the Duke had a house in Soho, then King's Square. It is much
more likely that the reverse is the case, and the Duke took the
watchword from the locality in which he lived, for the word Soho occurs
in the rate-books long before the Battle of Sedgemoor was fought. In
1634 So-howe appears in State papers; and various other spellings are
extant, as Soe-hoe, So-hoe. This district was at one time a favourite
hunting-ground, and Halliwell-Phillipps in the "Dictionary of Archaic
and Provincial Words" suggests that the name has arisen from a favourite
hunting cry, "So-ho!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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