Old House, Queen Square, Bloomsbury, ca.1883

From: Henry Dixon & Son

RA Collection: Art

"Elmes, in his life of Sir Christopher Wren, states that a "large mansion on the South side of Queen Square, Bloomsbury, now divided, is also by Wren, who built it for Lord Newcastle; the plans are among his drawings at All Souls' College, Oxford." The design may well be Wren's, but Elmes's book is the only one in which I have been able to find any ascription of the design to the great architect, or any mention of a Newcastle House in Queen Square. It is, moreover, clear from the arrangement of the windows that the house must have been built as we now see it; it cannot have been afterwards divided into two. Mr Ingram Bywater, a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, to whom I am also indebted for most kind assistance in the preparation of notes for the last series, was good enough to examine for me and to copy the drawings in All Souls' Library. One of the plans may certainly be referred to Newcastle House, Lincoln's-Inn-Fields (at the corner of Great Queen Street), and it would appear that Elmes confused Queen Square, Bloomsbury, with Queen Street, Lincoln's-Inn-Fields, and Wren with Winde or Wynne, the architect of Newcastle House."

The above description, by Alfred Marks, was taken from the letterpress which accompanies the photographs. Built in the reign of Queen Anne and named after her, Walford [Old and New London] describes Queen Square as once a fashionable area and inhabited by private families but gradually from the mid-nineteenth century this changed, as houses became hospitals and other charitable institutions. A short time after Dixon's photograph was taken, number 41 became the Italian Hospital, opening in the home of Giovanni Ortelli in 1884 and expanding into number 40. The Hospital was later to have a new building on the same site in 1898.