Place Name
After the village of Ridgmont, Bedfordshire, where Bloomsbury landowners, the dukes of Bedford also owned land. The name of the village was first recorded as Rugemund in 1227 and is taken from the French, Rouge Mont, meaning Red Hill on account of its deep reddish brown soil. This area was in the west of the dukes’ Bloomsbury estate, and up until the late 18thCentury remained undeveloped fields before being converted for residential use as part of a prestigious building project. It was designed as a mews for the estate residents. Horwood’s plan of 1799 shows the street running as far north as Pancras Street (today, Capper Street), and unnamed, though a map from 1827 shows its southern part between Store Street and Chenies Street – what would later become Ridgmount Street – as Little Store Street. The Ordnance Survey map of 1867 – 1870 has the whole street as Chenies Mews, but Weller’s map of the same period (1868) still shows this bit of the street as Little Store Street. In the late 19thCentury, the street was formally divided again, into Ridgmount Garden, north of Chenies Street, and Ridgmount Street, south of Chenies Street.