PLACE NAME
Henry Compton (1632 – July 7, 1713), Bishop of London in the 1670s, who was also Dean of the Chapel Royal and entrusted with the education of the two princesses, Mary and Anne. Compton was born the sixth and youngest son of the 2nd Earl of Northampton and educated at The Queen’s College, Oxford, before travelling in Europe. After the restoration of Charles II, he became a low-ranking officer in his brother Charles’s troop of the Royal Regiment of Horse, but soon quit the army for the church. He returned to study at Oxford and Cambridge, and after graduating as a Doctor of Divinity in 1669, went on to become Bishop of Oxford in 1674. The following year he was transferred to the see of London, and also appointed Dean of the Chapel Royal (hence Dean Street), charged with oversight of the ecclesiastical establishment within the royal household. The street itself was built by wealthy builder Richard Frith and his associates in about 1677, and was fully lined by houses by the mid 1680s. Dan Cruickshank in Soho says, “it was in effect, the south termination of the mini new town they, with the Earl of St Albans, had created south of Oxford Street, with Soho Square as its focus, on what in 1698 became the Portland Estate.” At the time, Compton was actively involved with Frith in the building of the local church of St Anne, which is dedicated in compliment to his pupil, the Princess Anne. The street was called Compton Street at first, as was still the case in 1746 when John Rocque published his map of London. By 1792 it had become one of Georgian Soho’s most important shopping thoroughfares, not to mention played an active role in the area’s still-discreet sex industry. Before its development, the area had been fields, part of Cooke’s Croft and Billson’s Close or Croft.
