Place Name
Industrial heritage. So-called because of the clay deposits used for making the bricks that helped build London. In fact the industrial usage gave this area of Aye Manor its name Brick Close. Gillian Bebbington in London Street Names describes it as “an old lane, marked on a plan of 1614 as a hedgerow dividing two fields. The field on the north side, now the land between Brick Street and Shepherd Street, was then the Brickhill or Brick Kiln Close. The field lay in the valley of the Tyburn which was rich in brick-earth.” Having originally been part of Westminster Abbey’s estate, it was seized by Henry VIII as part of his land grab against the Roman Catholic Church. In 1554 it was sold to two men, one of whom, William Jennings, bequeathed it to his grandson who held it until the first Lord Berkeley acquired it in 1675. John Berkeley was a Royalist commander who was rewarded with a barony after leading his troops to victory at Stratton in Cornwall. Today Brick Street runs from Old Park Lane to Piccadilly in a crescent. It wasn’t always that way. Cross’s New Plan of London from 1861 shows the section from Park Lane (as it was then) to Down Street as Carrington Place. While Edward Stanford’s Library Map of London and its Suburbs published in 1862 shows the section between Yarmouth Place and Piccadilly as Engine Street, so called after the watermill on the banks of the River Tyburn. It had changed to its present name by 1878.
