Leicester House
First built in the 1630s, writes Leonard W. Cowie, Leicester House became the London home of three eighteenth-century Princes of Wales.
The building of Leicester House in the seventeenth century heralded the expansion of London north-westwards beyond Charing Cross.
The pictorial map made about 1570, attributed to Ralph Agas, shows all the land between the churches of St Martin-in-the-Fields and St Giles-in-the-Fields as open pasture, on which animals are grazing and a woman is laying out washing to dry.
The only buildings are the King’s Mews, erected as early as 1377 and clustering at the back of Charing Cross. Later, the land belonged to the Crown, having been acquired about 1536 by Henry VIII, mainly from Westminster Abbey, probably with the aim of getting control of the springs that supplied his new palace of Whitehall with its water supply.
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