Mount Street research reveals early links with Percy Bysshe Shelley

My current research centres on a property in Mount Street, Mayfair.  There was nothing fashionable in the origins of the street which was built between 1720 and 1740.  Small, narrow-fronted houses stood next to shops, coffee houses, taverns and the premises of trades people.  The street was redeveloped at the end of the 19th century in a grand Neo-French Renaissance or Queen Anne style and has now become a mixture of exclusive shops, business premises and residential buildings.  It was in one of the Mount Street coffee houses in 1811 that the poet Shelley came early one morning to elope with sixteen year old Harriet Westbrook.  Five years later Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park after he left her.

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