The Gentleman Magazine Issue 20 | April 2020 | Page 79

Curzon Street was built circa 1705 by George Augustus Curzon,
3rd Viscount Howe, from whom the street takes its name.
Mayfair was initially developed for the wealthy and titled,
something that has changed little in the last three hundred
years. Number 45 Curzon Street was built circa 1785 and was
initially occupied by a widow, Temperance Rhodes. Historical
records reveal quite a noble and well connected list of residents
subsequent to Ms Rhodes, including the Hon James Hamilton
Stanhope, Son of the 3rd Earl Stanhope and nephew of
William Pitt the Younger, he was well-known in society and in
military circles, having seen service with Sir John Moore, Lord
Lyndedoch and the Duke of Wellington. By 1818 the property
had passed to Will Coleman, an upholsterer, which is the first
record of trade at the address, and by 1834 a furnishing and
iron monger named James Smith.
Surgeon James Metcalf Appleton acquired the property
before 1843: a naval surgeon who then passed the property
to his son, Thomas Cass Aplleton who by 1883 was running
a chemist’s shop at the address, with the upper floors let to
Colonel the Honourable James Pierce Maxwell, a son of the
6th Baron Farnham. By 1888 the property had been acquired
by physician Henry Roxburgh Fuller, physician to St George’s
Hospital on Hyde Park Corner (now world class luxury hotel
The Lanesborough) and to H.R.H. The Duke of Cambridge,
uncle of Queen Victoria.
In 1911 another man of medicine, Harold Dearden, acquired
the property: his specialty being psychology, having served
in Flanders during WWI. Dearden wrote and published a
number of successful books.
In 1926 the house was purchased by Sydney Frederick Studd,
who occupied the ground floor as an antique shop, renting the
upper floors to Cecilia Ivy Knight, later to become Ivy O’Neil-
Dunne. Dunne was friends with novelist Nancy Mitford, the
eldest of the Mitford sisters, who was regarded as one of the
“Bright Young People” on the London social scene between the
wars. As one of the gay, tin-hatted, members of the Auxiliary
Fire Service she stayed at 45 Curzon Street while keeping the
night watch, allegedly alternately resting on a make-shift bed
and running into the street, exhorting her companions to
“Come and look at the V1s. They are so pretty. Do admit”: V1s
being the flying bomb – also known to the Allies as the buzz
bomb or doodlebug!
Curzon Street runs from Park Lane to Berkeley Square, with
the Curzon Street house located in the Shepherds Market area
of Mayfair: the intircate and historical streets and alleys have
helped ensure that this exlcusive area of central London has
retained a human scale and village like feel.
The Gentleman Magazine | 79