PLACE NAME
Sir William Pulteney (March 22, 1684 – July 7, 1764), the prominent British Whig politician, later Baron of Hedon (hence Hedon Street) and the 1st Earl of Bath, who built the street in 1719-20. It appears on John Rocque’s 1746 map of London as Pulteney Street – the ‘Great’ was added later that century to distinguish it from Little Pulteney Street, now the eastern end of Brewer Street. Pulteney sat in the House of Commons from 1707 to 1742, and held such positions during that time as secretary of war between 1714 to 1717 under King George I, a member of the privy council and Cofferer of the Household in 1723. In the 1720s he became head of the wealthy Pulteney family, powerful landowners since at least 1575, when a Thomas Pulteney is recorded as farming some fields in the area of what is now Mayfair. He was succeeded by another Thomas, probably his son, who enclosed the old common lands and threatened death to any that presumed to still farm them. As the value of the land increased with the development of the West End, the family grew rich in wealth and power. Before its development the area had been the northern part of Windmill Field, a memory of the medieval open field system of cultivation, around modern Great Windmill Street. It was owned by the Mercers’ Company and acquired by the Crown in 1536. In 1559 it was part of a large area of Soho granted by Queen Elizabeth I to William Doddington, who a few years later sold it to brewer Thomas Wilson. In the 1570s James Poultney became a subtenant of a portion of the Manor of St James and gradually acquired more land in the area, upon which his descendant and heir Sir William built this and several neighbouring streets, Great Pulteney Street being the estate’s showpiece, in the early 18thCentury. Many ‘Great’ streets were renamed in the late 1930s by the London County Council which attempted to remove all prefixed names from the London Directory. Those that survived did so because removing them was deemed to be harmful or destructive of historical interest. In 1808 the land passed to a distant relative, Sir Richard Sutton, a descendant of Baron Lexington. The town of Poultney and the River Poultney in Vermont USA were also named after Sir William.
