PLACE NAME
A possible agricultural reference. On John Rocque’s 1746 map the route is defined as a footpath marking the northern boundary of the district of Bloomsbury. It continued east from Tottenham Court Road to the newly-established Foundling Hospital; to its north was undeveloped fields, and immediately to its south, a timber yard. To the west of Tottenham Court Road, Windmill Street had already been laid out marking the site of, unsurprisingly, a windmill which stood at the junction with Charlotte Street until about 1750. By the time Horwood produced his plan of London in 1799, the land had been acquired by the dukes of Bedford, who already owned large swathes of Bloomsbury, and the street was formally laid out as Great Store Street, while its eastern continuation, Keppel Street, had only just started being laid out. The fields to the north had started being converted to streets and housing, though Cox’s Garden, east of Tottenham Court Road, still appears on the 1799 map. The prefix Great was dropped sometime during the late 19thCentury, before London County Council’s wider move in the 1930s to drop all prefixed names from the London Directory.
