Place Name
One of the first streets to be built in the area, it was named after the English courtier and politician Mountjoy Blount (about 1597 – February 12, 1666), 1st Earl of Newport, who, from 1633, lived in a house which faced onto what is now Little Newport Street. Before that the street was part of Military Street, a path from St Martin’s Lane to the Military Ground which occupied the site of Gerrard Street, Macclesfield Street and Gerrard Place. Blount became a member of James I’s court, where he was something of a royal favourite. He was part of the entourage which accompanied the young Prince Charles (later Charles I) through Paris incognito on his way to Spain to negotiate his ill-starred union with Princess Maria Anna, daughter of Philip III of Spain. The street itself was first inhabited in 1612, when the 2nd Earl of Salisbury granted to John Waller, a yeoman of Sussex, a lease on condition that he would erect several “substantial and well built dwelling houses”. But within a few decades the properties had become slums, Salisbury bought out the lease from Waller’s heirs and resold it to Richard Ryder, a later master carpenter to Charles II, who then demolished the old properties and rebuilt. This intervention resulted in the north side of the street becoming very fashionable. John Strype, writing in 1720, said that the north side “hath far the best buildings and is inhabited by gentry whereas on the other side dwell ordinary tradespeople, of which several are of the French nation”. Oliver St John, 2nd Earl of Bollingbroke, lived here following the restoration, so did Elizabeth Countess of Holland, the 1st Earl of Carlisle, the 1st Viscount Townshend, the widow of the 3rd Earl of Anglesey and the 1st Earl of Halifax. In 1627 Blount was created Earl of Newport, and in 1634, he secured the position of Master of Ordnance for his lifetime, from the latter deriving a tidy fortune. That same year he extended his estate north to the present West Street and Cambridge Circus. Less than 20 years after his death, the land was sold for building and the house demolished. Rather than implying any particular grandeur or importance in a street, the prefix ‘Great’ generally indicated the presence of a corresponding ‘Little’ street in the neighbourhood. 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 to City businessmen or destructive of historical interest.
