Place Name
It is a name so familiar you might think its origins were set into the very foundations of its buildings. But check any reference to the naming of this street and it seems a different man is credited (or perhaps the same mean under different guises), it is a mystery almost worthy of a certain detective. Indeed, in some way Sherlock Holmes has been part of the problem. For in the rush to evoke the era of Hansom cabs, street urchins, and pea soupers, the street’s mid-18thCentury beginnings tend to get brushed aside. So here is what we do know for certain, the street is laid out on the Portman estate, 110 acres of prime property in Central London located between Oxford Street and Edgware Road and extending north towards the Marylebone Road and east to Manchester Square. The Portman family were originally from the west country, farming some 10,000 acres in Somerset. In 1532, Sir William Portman leased 270 acres of farmland two miles outside the City of London, 20 years later he bought the freehold – an astute purchase of which later generations of the family reaped the rewards. We know too, that for the next 200 years, the 11 fields which made up the estate remained farmland. That all changed in 1755 when Henry William Berkeley Portman granted a lease to William Baker (1715 – 1774) “of Saint Marylebone”. The signing of this agreement enabled him to issue the first building permissions. It is said that Baker was no stranger to the Portmans, having already run the family’s Marylebone estate for many years. Or, at least, that’s one story, as explained on the Portman estate’s website. There are, however, other contenders as neatly summited by thestreetnames. One cited is Sir Edward Baker Littlehales, another is Peter William Baker, described as an agent of the Portman family; a fourth is John Baker, also said to be a friend of the Portmans; and finally, Sir Robert Baker, a Bow Street magistrate. So which is it? Fortunately, we have the landed families blog to help unravel the riddle. William Baker was the son of a yeoman farmer originally of Bromley in Worfield, Shropshire, he moved to London to speculate on the booming property market. Having leased the land from the Portmans he built Orchard Street and Portman Street, and was a contractor on other Portman estate developments. He did very well for himself, and his son, Peter William Baker (1756 – 1815), was educated as a gentleman at Eton, Cambridge and Lincoln’s Inn. In 1781, the year of his marriage, he bought Ranston House, in Dorset for for 12,000 guineas. (In London street name terms this was to be significant.) Peter didn’t have any children, so his estate was left to his first cousin once removed, Sir Edward Baker Littlehales (1764 – 1825) on condition that he adopted the surname Baker, becoming Sir Edward Baker Baker the first baronet Baker of Ranston. Prior to receiving the inheritance Sir Edward was under-secretary of state to the ministry of defence in Dublin and it is recorded that “within a year or two he resigned and the family retired to Dorset”. The family probably arrived in 1819. Sir Edward meanwhile expanded the family’s property holdings buying Liston village green, then on the outskirts of London, and neighbouring the Portman estate. Sir Edward was succeeded by his son, also Sir Edward Baker (1806 – 1877), who became the 2nd baronet. According to Landed Families: “He never married, and in the 1860s he suddenly abandoned Dorset and relocated to London for the best part of a decade, visiting Dorset only for the occasional Friendly Society dinner. It is surprising to find that his return to Dorset in 1876 was greeted with spontaneous demonstrations of enthusiasm from his tenants and fellow-landowners, and when he died the following year the press tributes remained unusually warm.” When he died the family fortune was passed to his only surviving brother, the Reverend Sir Talbot Hastings Bendall Baker (1820 – 1900), 3rd bt. As the youngest son of the family, he had entered the church, but on outliving his three brothers, he now inherited the family seat, the title and the fortune. Soon afterwards he gave up the day-to-day life go a parish clergyman as the vicar of vicar of Preston, in Dorset. He married for a second time in 1875 , to a woman 27 years his junior, who bore him four children: one son and three further daughters. That’s the Baker family. As for the other contenders, John Baker was William Baker’s father, unless it refers to another one, and we can totally rule out Sir Robert Baker, who although found fame in later life as the Chief Magistrate at Bow Street would have been much too young at the time the road was laid out. So why any confusion? It all comes down to timing, William was responsible for the development of the earliest parts of the Portman estate property in Marylebone and also acted as a contractor for later developments. All of which made him a great deal of money. But when he died the road that was to become Baker Street had barely begun. There is a continuation of Orchard Street coming off of Great Berkley Street in John Rocque’s map of London in 1766 and the updated version three years later. And it would appear that development had not progressed much more by 1784, a decade after William’s death, when Alexander Hogg’s map of the city was published. Hence the suggestion that it may have been named after his son Peter William, who was still alive. But given that it was William who made the valuable connections with the Portman family, who signed the building lease, set about planning and laying out the first streets of the estate, and although not fully laid out had clearly intended for a street to be laid out, it was him that the honour must go. All elementary, really.
