Place Name
This ancient route, far older than Soho itself, has carried the name Wardour Street since about 1690 when it was re-named after its 17thCentury landowner, the politician and official of the Exchequer come property speculator, Sir Edward Wardour (November 16, 1578 – about 1647). Wiltshire-born Wardour did a brief stint at Lincoln’s Inn before entering public office as an under-clerk to his father in the Pells Office (an accounting role in the Exchequer), a post he appears to have held until becoming joint clerk with his father in 1603. He became sole clerk after his father’s death, so preserving the family’s hold over the office for a further generation. He was knighted in 1618, elected Member of Parliament for his home town of Malmesbury in 1621, and re-elected in 1624 and 1625. Despite success in public affairs he was constantly dogged by financial problems and speculated in property to supplement his income. The route was already well-established, having started life as a lane between parcels of land owned by different estates, by the time Wardour acquired the land, in 1631. At first it was called Colman Hedge Lane after a nearby field which was first recorded as Colmanhegg in 1390. Later it served as an important route between Tyburn Road, or the road to Uxbridge (later, Oxford Street) and the royal quarter of Westminster and Whitehall. On Ogilby & Morgan’s map of 1681-2 it is called So Ho, a name which apparently derives from a hunting cry similar to Tally Ho, recalling the area’s use during Tudor times as a hunting ground. Wardour’s grandson, another Edward Wardour set about developing the estate in the 1680s, during a post-restoration construction flurry, with the help of Thomas Green, Richard Hopkins and Richard Tyler, hence nearby Green’s Court, Hopkins Street and Tyler’s Court. By about that time most of Soho’s streets had been laid out in a plan-form which still largely exists today and the street starts appearing on maps as Wardour Street, as seen on Blome’s 1690 map of the parish of St Anne’s. On John Rocque’s 1746 map its course had been divided up into sections, with Wardour Street applying to the section between Oxford Street and Peter Street; between Peter Street and Brewer Street is Old Soho and south of that, down to Coventry Street is Princes Street. It was all renamed in 1878.
