Off the beaten track - Marylebone High Street

Everyone thinks of Oxford Street with its department stores as the centre of London shopping. And it is of course, but just off the main street there are many, often more interesting streets.

I love Marylebone High Street with is fashionable shops, and Marylebone Lane with its collection of more eclectic shops. Years ago I used to sing in St Paul’s in Robert Adam Street, just round the corner, and drink in the pubs around the High Street afterwards - see the picture of the wonderfully named imbibing emporium above! And in more recent times I have done lots of work at the Hellenic Centre near the top of the High Street, so it’s all familiar territory to me.

The original village of Marylebone – Tyburn – was not along the High Street but at the junction of what is now Marylebone Lane and Oxford Street. At the time there was a bridge over the Tyburn stream. Long gone of course!

Tyburn was recorded in the Domesday Book and stood approximately at the west end of what is now Oxford Street at the junction of two Roman roads. The predecessors of Oxford Street and Park Lane were roads leading to the village, then called Tyburn Road and Tyburn Lane respectively.

The village was one of two manors of the parish of St Marylebone, ( St Marylebone meaning St Mary's church by the bourne). Bourne is an old name for stream.

Tyburn was famous for one thing. Executions! Which in those days were public spectacles and proved extremely popular, attracting crowds of thousands including young Thomas Culpepper who had an affair with Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard and was beheaded at Tyburn!

In the 1700’s the houses were all at the Oxford Street end and there were fields to the north. To the east were gardens which, later in the 18th century became a popular pleasure resort. Samuel Pepys visited them in 1668 – with some young ladies as usual!! – and by the 1760s Dr Arne and Handel were writing music, mainly songs, to be performed there.

Most of the buildings in the High Street today date from around 1900 but the winding route of Marylebone Lane, which follows the course of the old Tyburn stream is a contrast with the grid layout of the Georgian development and an antidote to the chain dominated shops that occupy the High Street.

Information sourced from the de Walden estate and Wikipedia.