Place Name
Industrial heritage. By association with the old Phoenix Iron Foundry once on the corner of Mount Pleasant and the west side of Phoenix Place. The name was chosen to symbolise the transformations taking place therein. In 1734 William Vernon, distiller, took a lease from landowners Baynes and Warner and built a distillery some six years later. However the lease to the property was short – just 51 years – and when it ran out the distillery was converted to, or rebuilt, in 1808 as the Phoenix Iron Foundry. Phoenix Place came later, in 1840, laid out on open-land along the course of the River Fleet, which had been rechannelled in underground pipes. It seems to have originated as a cul-de-sac giving access to part of the foundry premises, and was later extended along the west side of Cold Bath Fields Prison to link up with Calthorpe Street. The Foundry was there until 1964.
