Lisson Grove


Lisson Grove is a street and district in the City of Westminster in London, England. The neighbourhood contains a few important cultural landmarks, including Lisson Gallery, Alfies Antique Market, Red Bus Recording Studios, the former Christ Church, now the Greenhouse Centre, Stringers of London and the Seashell of Lisson Grove.
The heart of the community and retail/services zone is Church Street Market, which runs between Lisson Grove itself and Edgware Road.The market specialises in antiques and bric-à-brac, and has flourished since the 1960s. The area saw its suburban decades - on the edge of London - from the late 18th century, and some fine Georgian terraces remain. Early residents included artists such as Benjamin Haydon and Charles Rossi, whose former cottage still stands at 116 Lisson Grove. Lord's Cricket Ground adjoined Lisson Grove in the early nineteenth century before re-locating to St Johns Wood to the north. The area is bounded by St John's Wood Road to the north, Regent's Park to the east, Edgware Road to the west and Marylebone Road to the south.
Church Street electoral ward, as currently drawn, is approximately the same. Lisson Grove is predominantly residential, with a mid-to-high population density for Inner London. The council's profile describes Church Street as an ethnically diverse ward, having one of the highest concentrations of social housing in the borough with a substantial estate renewal programme underway.

History

Manor of Lileston

Lisson Grove, occasionally referred to as Lissom Grove, takes its name from the manor of Lileston, which was included in the Domesday Book in 1086. Domesday recorded the presence of 8 households within the manor, suggesting a population of around forty. The manor stretched as far as the boundary with Hampstead.
From the 12th century onwards, the Manor of Lileston and the neighbouring Manor of Tyburn) were served by the parish of St Marylebone, an area which had consistent boundaries until the parish's successor, the Metropolitan Borough of St Marylebone merged with neighbouring areas to form the City of Westminster in 1965.
The Manor of Lileston subdivided with the Manor of Lisson green becoming an independent landholding.
The edges of Lisson Grove are defined by the two current Edgware Road stations facing onto Edgware Road or Watling Street as it was previously known, one of the main Roman thoroughfares in and out of London. The road is also the western boundary of the wider Marylebone district.

Early development

Until the late 18th century the district remained essentially rural. Much of Lisson Grove had become a slum in Victorian London, notorious for drinking, crime and prostitution particularly in its pockets of extreme poverty with archetypal squalor, overcrowding and dilapidation. The arrival of the Regent's Canal in 1810 and the railway at Marylebone in 1899 led to rapid urbanisation of Lisson Grove.

Post-WWI development

After World War I, the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, announced a policy of "Homes Fit for Heroes", leading to a sponsored housing boom from which Lisson Grove benefitted. In 1924, St Marylebone Borough Council completed the Fisherton Street Estate of seven apartment blocks in red-brick neo-Georgian style with high mansard roofs grouped around two courtyards. Noted for their innovation as some of the first social housing to include an indoor bathroom and toilet, since 1990 this has been a conservation area The blocks were named mostly for the notable former residents of Lisson Grove and its surrounding areas, which drew Victorian landscape painters, sculptors, portraitists and architects:
After World War II, further social housing was completed at the Church Street Estate and the larger Lisson Green Estate. In 1960 a new Labour Exchange was established on Lisson Grove to much fanfare, and later featured in punk music history as the place where members of The Clash first met. The area also became known for its antiques trade.
In the 2010s, Westminster City Council have proposed extensive regeneration.

Notable residents

  • Charles Rossi sculptor at 21, Lisson Grove, 1810
  • Leigh Hunt, resided at 13, Lisson Grove North on his release from Horsemonger Prison in 1815 and was visited on many occasions by Lord Byron here
  • Benjamin Haydon, painter at 21 Lisson Grove, 1817, tutor of Edwin Landseer and his brother
  • Edwin Landseer and various members of his family congregated to live at Cunningham Place. From 1825 he first lived at 1, St John's Wood Road on the corner of Lisson Grove in a small cottage on the site of Punker's Barn. This was later demolished in 1844 to make place for a small but "rather aristocratic" house. The Cubitt designed house was later demolished in 1894 to make way for artisan workers homes built by the railway arranged as Wharncliffe Gardens.
  • George Augustus Henry Sala, journalist, born in 1828, recalls growing up in Lisson Grove during the 1830s "when the principal public buildings were pawnbrokers, and 'leaving shops', low public houses and beershops and cheap undertakers."
  • Catherine Sophia Blake, William Blake's widow, lived from 1828 to 1830, at 20 Lisson Grove North, London as housekeeper to Frederick Tatham.
  • Samuel Palmer, landscape painter and etcher lived at 4, Street, Lisson Grove, Marylebone
  • Mary Shelley moved to North Bank, 28 March 1836 for one year with her son
  • Thomas Henry Huxley, resident at North Bank during the 1850s
  • James Augustus St John moved in 1858 from North Bank to Grove End Road
  • Dr Southwood Smith moved to Lisson Grove in 1859 to work at the London Fever Hospital. Smith's granddaughter Octavia Hill, whom he brought up, later lived at 190 Marylebone Road becoming a founder of the Peabody Trust and have a great impact on the social housing movement evident in Lisson Grove from the 1890s onwards.
  • Emily Davies, founder of Girton College, Cambridge lived at 17, Cunningham Place from 1863 to 1875 with her mother.
  • George Eliot and her husband bought The Priory, 21 North Bank in 1863 and held many of her Sunday receptions during the 17 years she spent there until 1880.
  • William Henry Giles Kingston born in London, 1814 at Harley Street, lived at No. 6, North Bank
  • Jerome K. Jerome attended the Philological School, now Abercorn School on the corner of Lisson Grove and Marylebone Road during the early 1870s.
  • Arthur Machen, at Edward House, 7 Lisson Grove during World War I until the 1920s.
  • Agatha Christie rented 5, Northwick Terrace during 1918–1919
  • Guy Gibson, V.C recipient, leader of the Dambusters Raid lived at 32 Aberdeen Place between 1918 and 1944.

    Geography

Lisson Grove is predominantly residential in West London, with a mid-to-high population density for Inner London. The council's profile describes Church Street as an ethnically diverse ward, having one of the highest concentrations of social housing in the borough with a substantial estate renewal programme underway.
The heart of the community and retail is Church Street Market, which runs between Lisson Grove itself and Edgware Road.The market specialises in antiques and bric-à-brac, and has flourished since the 1960s.

Arts and antiques

The area has a long association with art, artists and theatre. In 1810 the Royal Academy catalogues give sculptor Charles Rossi's address as 21 Lisson Grove, where he had bought a large house. By 1817, Rossi was renting out a section of the house to painter Benjamin Haydon. A blue plaque on the corner of Rossmore Road and Lisson Grove marks the spot and in 2000 author Penelope Hughes-Hallett wrote The Immortal Dinner with the focus on Haydon's dining companions invited to his Lisson Grove abode on 28 December 1817. Haydon's protégé Edwin Landseer lived north on Lisson Grove on the corner of St John's Wood Road from 1825.
The arrival of Dutch painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema at nearby 44, Grove End Road in the late 1870s inspired the naming of one of the Lilestone Estate apartment blocks built in the 1920s as Tadema House. Eastlake House, opposite Tadema House, is possibly named for Charles Eastlake whose Eastlake movement's underlying ethos of simple decorative devices that were affordable and easy to keep clean would have been of interest to those developing social housing in the 20th Century.
On Bell Street, the Lisson Gallery, established in 1967 by Nicholas Logsdail, championed the new British sculptors of the 1980s and continues to show new and established artists, with expanded premises further along Bell Street. Mark Jason Gallery at No. 1 Bell Street specialises in promoting contemporary British and international artists.
In 2006 the Subway Gallery arrived in the Joe Strummer Subway which runs under the Marylebone Road. Conceived by artist Robert Gordon McHarg III, the space itself is a 1960s kiosk with glass walls which creates a unique showcase for art, interacting naturally with passers by, visitors and the local community.
The Show Room is on Penfold Street, next to the main Aeroworks factory. The Show Room is a non-profit space for contemporary art that is focused on a collaborative and process-driven approach to production, be that artwork, exhibitions, discussions, publications, knowledge and relationships.
Church Street runs parallel to St John's Wood Road and plays host to a varied market Mondays–Saturdays, 8am–6pm selling fruit and vegetables, clothes, and bags amongst other items. Towards the Lisson Grove end of Church Street is Alfies Antique Market, London's largest indoor market for antiques, collectables, vintage, and 20th century design is in the former Jordans Department Store, decorated with an Egyptian art deco theme similar to the Aeroworks - the indoor market, "houses more than 200 permanent stall holders and covers in excess of 35,000 sq ft of shop space on five floors." Opened in 1976 by Bennie Gray, in the then derelict department store, the Antiques Market has since spawned twenty or so individual shops at the Lisson Grove end of Church Street specialising in mainly 20th-century art and collectables