History
The Temple West family originally owned the land here, hence the name. In 1791, the area was leased for house building. By 1799, the garden in the centre of the square was finished.
In 1812, a tower was built by the Admiralty at 36 West Square for a telegraph using shutters. During the Napoleonic Wars, this transmitted messages between Whitehall and the Royal Navy in Kent. In the 1800s, the square was used to house some staff at the Bethlem Royal Hospital (now the Imperial War Museum).
J. A. R. Newlands (1837–1898), the Victorian chemist who discovered the Periodic Law for the chemical elements, was born and raised in a house at the south-west corner of the square. A blue plaque, installed by the Royal Society of Chemistry, commemorates Newlands on the front of the house.
In 1884–5, the Charlotte Sharman School was built on the north-west side, named after its founder the Christian philanthropist. It is still located there.
As a young child, Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) lived at 39 West Square for a short period. He later recalled:
- West Square! At the back of the Bedlam Lunatic Asylum. This is as far back as I can remember as a child. It was there, somewhere around the age of three, we lived in a large house.
At the end of the 19th century, the garden in the square was threatened with building development, but there was a campaign to keep it. In 1909, the freehold was bought for £3,500 by the London County Council and the Metropolitan Borough of Southwark. They enlarged and restored the garden, which was then opened for public use in 1910. The square was scheduled to protect it under the 1931 London Squares Preservation Act. However, after the Second World War, it was proposed that the buildings should be demolished and the area added to Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park. This was blocked by the Civic Amenities Act and instead the square became a conservation area. Following the War, the north-west corner of the square was demolished and prefab houses were built. However, the square still remains largely intact and of historic interest.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)