Place Name
The Doughty family, staunch Catholics buried in the churchyard of Old St Pancras, acquired an area of land in Holborn from the Brownlow family in the early 18thCentury. Its first recorded owner was the Tudor John Brownlow whose son Richard was Chief Protonotary of the Court of Common Pleas in the time of Elizabeth I. In 1710 Elizabeth Brownlow married Philip Doughty of Snarford Hall, Lincoln and the land became part of the Doughty estate. Its development proceeded slowly, and it wasn’t until 1792 that their grandson Henry Doughty, son of George Brownlow Doughty and Frances Tichborne, after who this street is named, started building here. On May 6, 1762 Henry had married Anne Maria Byron and the couple went on to have two children. An earlier forerunner to the street appears on John Rocque’s 1746 map, parallel to Millman Street, only as Mewse. By the time Horwood’s 1819 map was published it had been renamed Robert Street, and by 1916 it had been so-named. The Doughty family estate became extinct in the 1820s and the land passed to their relatives, the Tichbornes. In 1882 the Egypt Exploration Fund (now the Egypt Exploration Society) was founded, and remains, here.
