Beautiful Streets

Streets, squares, mews and lanes. The most charming streetscapes in London. Some well known, some hidden gems.

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De Beauvoir Square

Four terraces of Jacobean-style villas round a garden: the only square of a plan that was never finished.

Squares & yards

The gables on the square. Photo by Des Blenkinsopp, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A brickmaker called William Rhodes, grandfather of Cecil, took a lease on 150 acres here in 1821 and drew a grid with four squares meeting an octagon. The lease turned out to have been obtained unfairly, the court case ran for twenty years, and by the time it was settled his customers had moved to west London; this is the only square that was ever built. It is worth the journey for the houses, gabled and mullioned in a Tudor-Jacobean manner hardly used anywhere else in London, standing in four groups around a garden anybody can walk into.

Where
De Beauvoir Square, N1 4LD
Nearest station
Haggerston · 5 min walk

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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.

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