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The History of Marylebone

Marylebone was formerly (until 1965) part of the metropolitan borough of St.Marylebone. It is located to (what is now) the south and west of Regent's Park, north of Mayfair, west of Fitzrovia and east of Bayswater. The natural boundaries are roughly Edgware Road (west), Oxford Street (south), Great Portland Street (east) and Marylebone Road (north).

The name Marylebone derives from a medieval church constructed on the banks of the Tyburn and called St. Mary-by-the-Bourne, later Maryburne. The manor house house (demolished in 1791) was converted into a hunting lodge by Henry V111, and Marylebone Gardens, ajoining the manor house, was a centre for spectacles, sporting events, and concerts from the mid-17th century until 1778.

Notable buildings include Hertford House (1776-88) in Manchester Square, home for more than a century to the renowned Wallace Collection, All Souls Church, the historic women's school of Queen's College (1848), and Wigmore Hall, the site of chamber music concerts. Marylebone is the setting for the Sherlock Holmes Museum on Baker Street, Madame Tussaud's wax museum and the London Planetarium. Marylebone boast several embassies and high commissions, mostly within the confines of Portland Place. Portland Place also houses the Royal Institute of British Architects in a 1930's building by George Grey Wornum.

Modern Marylebone forms an integral part of London's West End with an invigorating mix of business, residential, educational, cultural and historical interests. As with most large London neighbourhoods, Marylebone boasts many busy and important High Street shopping and entertainment centres. These include Marylebone High Street, now dubbed Marylebone Village by its majority freeholder the Howard de Walden Estate who plan to turn it into a major West End shopping area, Marylebone Lane, St Christophers Place, Oxford Street and Baker Street.

Private doctors and consultants first began moving into Harley and Wimpole Streets in the mid 1800's. In an elegant stucco building in Chandos Street is probably the oldest medical society in the world. Founded in 1773 by a Quaker physician, Dr John Coakley Lettsom, the Medical Society of London sought to bring together the three warring factions at that time: physicians, surgeons and apothecaries. Originally limited to twenty of each, the society now has about 600 members.

It was in the 1930's that this area became known as 'Pill Island' but only in the 1940's and 1950's did the consulting rooms in family houses give way to establishments with a dozen medical men sharing the same front door. Approximately 1,500 private medical practitioners are active in the area today.