Eaton Square

Eaton Square is a residential garden square in London's exclusive Belgravia district. It is one of the three garden squares built by the Grosvenor family when they developed the main part of Belgravia in the 19th century, and is named after Eaton Hall, the Grosvenor country house in Cheshire. Eaton Square is larger but less grand than the central feature of the district, Belgrave Square, and both larger and grander than Chester Square. The first block was laid out by Thomas Cubitt from 1827.

The houses in Eaton Square are generously proportioned, predominantly three bay wide buildings, joined in regular terraces in a classical style, with four or five main storeys, plus attic and basement and a mews house behind. The square is one of London's largest and is divided into six compartments by the upper end of Kings Road (northeast of Sloane Square), a main road, now busy with traffic, that occupies its long axis, and two smaller cross streets. Most of the houses are faced with white stucco, but some are faced with brick.

Before World War II Eaton Square was a securely upper class address, but not of the grandeur of London's very grandest addresses in Mayfair and Belgravia:Belgrave Square, Grosvenor Square, St James's Square or Park Lane. However, after World War II, when those places were converted to mainly commercial and institutional use, Eaton Square remained almost wholly residential and rose to the front rank of fashionable addresses. It is sometimes said, especially by local estate agents, to be the most desirable of all London addresses. Some of the houses remain undivided, but much of the square has been converted into flats and maisonettes by the Grosvenor Estate. These are often lateral conversions, that is they cut across more than one of the original houses, and they usually cost several million pounds. The exterior appearance of the square remains as it was when it was built, with no intrusive modern buildings. Most but not all of the freeholds still belong to the Grosvenor Group, and the present Duke of Westminster has his own London home in the square - an illustration of the migrations of the London elite already mentioned, as up until the 1920s his predecessors lived in a detached mansion on the site of the present Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane.

At the east end of the square is St Peter's, a large Church of England church, in a classical style, which features a six-columned Ionic portico and a clock tower. It was designed by Henry Hakewill and built between 1824 and 1827 during the first development of Eaton Square.

Literary references

Eaton Square is the address of Prince Amerigo and his wife, the former Maggie Verver, in the last complete major novel by Henry James, The Golden Bowl.

Notable residents

*No. 1: Lord Boothby - parliamentarian and political commentator
*No. 37: Neville Chamberlain - British Prime Minister
*No. 37: Joachim von Ribbentrop - German Ambassador to London
*No. 54: Vivien Leigh, Oscar winning actress; currently resided by Luise Rainer, Oscar winning actress from 1936 and 1937
*No. 72: Sir Robert Helpmann - Actor, Dancer and choreographer, mostly remembered for his role in the film "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang".
*No. 80: George Peabody - American banker and philanthropist
*No. 86: Lord Halifax - British Foreign Secretary
*No. 93: Stanley Baldwin - British Prime Minister
*No. 100: Gerald Grosvenor, 6th Duke of Westminster - the freeholder of most of the square and most of the surrounding district.
*No. 6: Sean Connery - Actor
*No. ??: George Soros - Hungarian-born hedge fund manager.
*No. ??: Roger Moore - Actor
*No. ??: Vladimir Brooke - Son of Hedge Fund Magnate Ben Brooke
*No. ??: José Mourinho - Portuguese football manager (of Chelsea)
*No. ??: Nigella Lawson and Charles Saatchi - Celebrity TV chef and her advertising guru husband.
*No. ??: Henry Hughes Wilson - Field Marshal
*No. ??: Princess Katherine of Greece and Denmark
*No. ??: Alfred Robens, Baron Robens of Woldingham - British politician and chairman of the National Coal Board
*No. ??: Roman Abramovich - Russian billionaire and the main owner of private investment company Chelsea

External links

* [http://www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap.srf?x=528396&y=179036&z=1&sv=Eaton+Square&st=6&tl=Eaton+Square,+London,+SW1w&searchp=newsearch.srf&mapp=newmap.srf Map and aerial photo]

* [http://www.eatonsquareconcerts.org.uk Eaton Square Concerts] - a classical concert series based at St Peter's Church, Eaton Square [http://www.eatonsquareconcerts.org.uk]