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.
Read more about this topic: West Square
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)