Place Name
Laid out over the extensive lands of the former Bloomsbury town house of the dukes of Bedford. The work was commissioned in 1800 by Francis Russell, 5th Duke of Bedford (July 23, 1765 – March 2, 1802), who had a grand vision of developing the area which had already begun by his grandmother. (Like all the Bedford dukes he held the secondary title the Marquess of Tavistock, which is used by the eldest son and heir to the dukedom.) By 1803, James Burton, John Nash’s favourite builder, had begun work on the project knocking down the 240-year-old Bedford House and had begun laying out the future streets. But progress was stalled by the Napoleonic Wars, which diverted both capital and labour from civil developments, and so it was not completed until 1820. The name itself comes from the West Devon town which was granted to John Russell, later the 1st Earl of Bedford, the founder of the family’s fortune, by Henry VIII during his land grab against the Roman Catholic Church. Tavistock Abbey, also known as the Abbey of Saint Mary and Saint Rumon, which had been the home to a monastic order of Benedictines. It is believed to have been founded in AD974 by Ordwulf, the son of a powerful landowner called Ordgar who ruled Devon on behalf of the king, Edgar the Peaceful. Having been rebuilt in the 10thCentury after being sacked by Vikings, the abbey grew to be one of the wealthiest in Devon. It was finally shut in 1539 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The name, Tavistock was first mentioned in 1086 in the Domesday Book as Tavestocha, comes from stoc, the old word for place, and the nearby River Tavy, and literally means place by the Tavy. As for the 5th Duke, after being educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, he became a Whig and one of the leading debaters in the House of Commons opposing many of William Pitt the Younger’s measures. He never married but enjoyed a colourful personal life, having become embroiled in a a menage a trois with Charles Maynard, second Viscount Maynard, and his wife Anne, Lady Maynard. In 1795, when the government imposed a tax on hair powder, Bedford rebelled against levy and abandoned the powdered and tied hairstyle commonly worn by wealthy men at the time in favour of a cropped, unpowdered style, which became known as the Bedford Level, a pun on an area of The Fens reclaimed by the family. His younger brother took the dukedom on his death.
