This street was originally called Compton Street, and its whole length is so named on Rocque's map published in 1746. On Horwood's map of 1799 the part between Greek Street and Crown Street is called Little Compton Street and is so named in the parish ratebooks from the 1820's. From the same period the part west of Greek Street is given its present name in the ratebooks. In 1896 this name was extended to the entire street.
Compton Street was one of the streets of Soho Fields where development proceeded more rapidly than in the three running from north to south. Newly built houses are mentioned in 1677 and 1678. The street is included in the first available St. Martin in the Fields ratebook to name the streets in Soho Fields, in 1679, when there were fourteen ratepayers listed there. By 1681 the street was more than half built and appears fully built in the ratebook for 1683.
It seems clear that the street was named by Frith and his associates in compliment to Henry Compton, Bishop of London. Frith, Compton and the authorities of St. Martin's parish were involved together in 1677 in the exchange of properties by which the church of St. Anne was given the site south of Compton Street appropriated to it in 1678. At the Greek Church site Frith and the bishop were also mutually concerned at that time.
The plan appended to Joseph Girle's licence to build in Soho Fields in 1676 shows a piece of ground about 220 feet long at the north-west end of the future line of the street separated off from the rest of Kemp's Field. It is inscribed 'patridges' . Here Frith evidently had to take account of an existing tenancy. The lease of a site within this area in February 1677/8 was made to the building speculator Isaac Symball by Richard Partridge, brewer, and John Gazaigne, tailor, both of St. Martin in the Fields, for a term expiring in 1707. In July Frith confirmed the lease, and granted a further term to 1729.
Hardly any of the first tradesmen directly responsible for building the street can be named. On the south side a building lessee from Frith and Pym c. 1678 was Richard Tyler, the brickmaker who built elsewhere in St. Anne's and St. James's. Tyler also held by March 1678/9 the plot of ground on the north side of the street already referred to, by assignment from Symball. A joiner, William Ellison of St. Anne's, had a building lease from Frith or Pym of a site on the north side, and appears as ratepayer c. 1680–5. Ellison became over-indebted to a mortgagee and about 1686 retired from Compton Street to the confines of the Fleet. His experience was similar to that of another builder in this street and elsewhere, John Markham, a carpenter, who had leases from Frith of four or five houses in the street. One lease, dated in February 1677/8, of an unfinished house on the north side was for fifty years from Lady Day 1678 at a peppercorn rent. Markham appears as ratepayer in 1680–1. His troubles with Frith and with a victualler, by whom he was dispossessed, are described elsewhere.
Some of the premises are said in the recitals on which knowledge of these early leases depends, to include 'shops', and it is probable that in fact the street was from the beginning at least in part a shopping street. The ratepayers, however, occasionally included a lady of title until the early eighteenth century. Among the ratepayers' names were always some seemingly of French extraction, and by the first decade of the eighteenth century these constituted more than a quarter of the whole. Strype in 1720 said 'This Street is broad, and the Houses well built, but of no great Account for its Inhabitants, which are chiefly French': among the ratepayers at that time, perhaps a third had French-seeming names.
In the 1720's and 1730's a partial rebuilding took place, mostly in anticipation of a Portland lease from 1734. Only some of the rebuilding, however, was controlled by a Portland building lease.
By the time that the Portland estate map was made c. 1792–3 only seven or eight of the 78 houses seem to have been without shop fronts (some of these being taverns). The tenants' occupations are legibly marked on twenty-six out of the thirty-two house-sites on the north side between Wardour Street and Greek Street. They are baker, broker, cabinet-maker, carpenter, carver and gilder (two), 'chinam[erchan]t', 'clothm[erchan]t', coalmerchant, confectioner, goldbeater, goldsmith and jeweller, haberdasher, hairdresser, ironmonger, oilman, perfumer, pianofortemaker, publican (three), tallow- or waxchandler (two), tinman, upholsterer and whitesmith. Tallis's view of the street west of Greek Street in 1838–40 shows shop fronts to every house.
The Post Office directory in 1850 lists many ordinary retail shops in the street, but workers in wood and metal also appear. There were rather more eating-houses and public houses or hotels here than in the streets northward.
In the last third of the nineteenth century the street experienced a full share of the renewed influx of foreigners into Soho. Among the refugees from the suppression of the Commune were Verlaine and Rimbaud, and in the winter of 1872–3 one of their haunts was a bar at the eastern end of Old Compton Street. By 1900 the names listed in the Post Office directory suggest that nearly half the occupants of premises in the street were foreign, and at about that time journalists could comment on the sale or publication of continental socialist and anarchist papers hereabouts. In the early 1930's the foreign element seems to have been larger still, and remains strong today. Compared with 1900 the modern street has fewer public houses, and considerably more restaurants and cafés; foreign provision shops have also noticeably increased in numbers since 1900, and these two categories now account for the use of about half the premises in the street, at ground-floor level.
The street is now in fact the main shopping street of Soho, noted for the wide range of foreign produce it offers. Architecturally it contains very little of interest. Four houses on the south side, Nos. 29, 31, 33 and 37, retain early eighteenthcentury interior finishings, but their exteriors have been greatly altered. Although a large number of other buildings of domestic type remain, none appears to be earlier than the late eighteenth century, and these are notable only for the absolute plainness of their brick fronts. None of the wide variety of shop fronts shown in Tallis's street-view of 1838–40 remains, and only two stuccoed fronts of the mid nineteenth century have any claim to stylishness, No. 50 (also numbered 61 Dean Street), and Nos. 40–42. Nevertheless, there has been very little building of large commercial blocks, apart from the Casino Cinema, to obliterate the original site-divisions of the street. The new buildings that have appeared in considerable numbers in recent years mostly preserve the narrow frontages and are finished unobtrusively in brick or metal and glass.
The rateable value of the houses in the street westward of Greek Street totalled some £1,780 in 1740, with an average for each house of about £30 10s. In 1792 the total assessment was about £1,870 and the average still about £31. In 1844 the total had risen to about £2,650 and the average to about £46, and in 1892 the total to about £4,630 and the average to about £93. The rise in the average assessment was partly accounted for by a fall, from sixty in 1792 to fifty in 1892, in the number of sites separately assessed.
Residents and lodgers in houses in Old Compton Street which are not described elsewhere have included:
Some artists whose addresses are given as being in Old Compton Street in exhibition catalogues and elsewhere, but whose names do not appear in the ratebooks, are listed below, with the years in which they occur:
Text extracted from British History Online, a digital library of key printed primary and secondary sources for the history of Britain and Ireland, with a primary focus on the period between 1300 and 1800.
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