This square was laid out from 1811 by a successful chimney sweep turned developer and was soon occupied by fashionable and wealthy people.  An early tenant of the house was Admiral George Stewart, Earl of Galloway, before it was acquired by the recently widowed Viscountess Dudley and Ward in the 1820s.  The enormous wealth of the Ward family derived from vast coal reserves on their land in Staffordshire as well as sugar plantations in Jamaica.  Later residents of the house included a director of the East India Company, a Baron of the Exchequer, an MP, Walter Agnew of the famous Bond Street art dealers, and the third Baron Greville.

Notable neighbours included the Duke of Brunswick, and Earls Lathom, Waldegrave, Shaftesbury and Shrewsbury.  Another was the pianoforte maker John Broadwood - at whose house Chopin gave a recital in 1837.  In the 1920s Somerset Maugham and his interior decorator wife Syrie threw glamorous parties - guests often included Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Ivor Novello, Noel Coward and D.H. Lawrence who mingled with the eccentric Lord Berners, the Sitwells and the Guinnesses.

Dating from 1858, this house represents the last hurrah in the building of big private villas around the common before the arrival of today's grids of Victorian and later development.  Members of the Clapham Sect of wealthy evangelicals lived nearby, including William Wilberforce whose house was just behind.

Residents included a banker, a tobacco manufacturer, a theatre proprietor and biscuit manufacturer John Carr, who introduced such now-familiar names as the garibaldi, bourbon and custard cream.  In 1870 his company sent 220 million biscuits to feed the besieged of Paris in a deal brokered by the Rothschild family.  During the early 20th century the house became a private hospital.  Then in the mid-1960s the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes moved in - the club's bar was allegedly visited by local resident Vivienne Westwood.

This was one of a row of houses built in c.1738 and called Elysium Row for its far-reaching views over nursery gardens.  The house was a country retreat for a deputy-auditor of the Exchequer in the 18th century.  In the 1850s it was a girls' school run by Baron de Wiercinski, a Polish patriot who had been imprisoned by the Austrians in the dungeon of Spilberg after the revolution of 1830.  The actor Frederick Sullivan later lived here, and his brother Arthur composed The Lost Chord while staying with him during his last illness in 1877.

From the 1920s the house was owned by the sculptor Peter Induni.  The stables and coach house were used as a studio by him and later by Hermon Cawthra, who carved the figure of Britannia which looks down on Piccadilly Circus.

This house was built in 1905 for Walter Runciman MP on the footprint of an early Georgian property. An extraordinary mixture of people has lived here, including Count Zinzendorf, a bishop of the Moravian church; a porter; a house painter; and the 9th Duke of Marlborough.  For a few years during the 18th century it was a boarding house for Westminster School boys.  In the 1860s Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton lodged at the house - he was heavily implicated in the notorious scandal involving transvestites Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton, aka 'Fanny and Stella'.

The street similarly fluctuated socially with a female refuge next door from the 1850s housing prostitutes willing to reform.  In 1903 most of the original properties were demolished to make way for smart new townhouses, offices and government buildings.

A house built c.1826 and home for many years to a wax chandler before it became a lodging house. Later residents included a wealthy tailor in the 1920s who fatally took poison mistaking it for mouthwash; and Sir John Arnold, a senior divorce and family judge.

In the 1890s Rosa Lewis ran a maison de convenience at a nearby house, where the Prince of Wales and his friends could take their mistresses.  Other neighbours were Lord Snowdon, who was born in the street; Whitehall mandarin and novelist C.P. Snow; the actor Christopher Lee; Sir John Rennie, head of MI6; and Sir Terence Conran.

This was rebuilt in 1927 on the site of an early 19th century house developed in the grounds of the curiously named Tart Hall, a Jacobean mansion belonging to Lord Stafford.  The first residents of the street followed a great range of crafts, trades and labouring occupations.  By about 1920 the area had become more fashionable - neighbours included the cookery writer Elizabeth David, who spent her childhood here; and Lady Idina Sackville, later a prominent member of the Happy Valley set in Kenya. Other residents included George Pitt-Rivers, a wealthy anthropologist and Eugenics expert, who was imprisoned in the Tower of London during WW2 as a Mosleyite Nazi sympathiser.  Randolph Churchill lived directly opposite.

Many of the early residents of this house built in 1884 were distinguished army officers.  General Sir Percy Radcliffe lived here in the 1920s and in the 1940s Major-General Gordon Grimsdale, who was head of the British Military Mission to China during World War II.  Later residents included George Sinclair-Stevenson, the doyen of the lawyers of Hong Kong, and the mezzo-soprano star Regina Sarfaty.

The Victorian historical painter Mrs. Henrietta Ward lived next door and gave art lessons to many of the royal children in a studio she converted from stables.  From 1930 to 1956 Noel Coward lived at this studio which he extensively remodelled.  His parties there often entailed a throng including Joan Crawford, Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier.

A semi-detached house built in c.1853 in an Italianate style.  The new district soon attracted wealthy professional people, as well as artists and writers including the poet Robert Browning and John Tenniel, the illustrator of Alice in Wonderland.  In the late 1870s the painter Edward Robert Hughes lived at the house.  As well as being an accomplished artist himself, Hughes was also studio assistant to the Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt, who suffered from glaucoma in old age.  He assisted him with the paintings The Light of the World and The Lady of Shalott.  A much later resident was India Jane Birley.

This semi-detached villa was built in c.1837 on the site of nursery gardens.  It was first home to a clerk at the Bank of England, and later a merchant trading with Japan and China.  When it was first built the house looked out over fields towards the Royal Caledonian Asylum, for the orphans of soldiers and sailors, and the new 'model' Pentonville prison.  Nearby was the extensive Laycock's Dairy which supplied London with milk until the 1860s.  The covered cattle lairs were used for keeping animals overnight on their way to Smithfield market.

A house built in 1847 on the Moore family's estate in Chelsea.  The first tenants were tradesmen and shared the house with others.  The street smartened up considerably from the 1950s - the first time that this house even had a bathroom - with neighbours such as Robin Denison-Pender who helped revitalise the fortunes of the Albert Hall in the 1970s.  The MP Sir Brandon Rhys Williams lived next door for many years.  In the early 1960s the artist John Doyle lived in this house and from the 1970s Countess Cawdor and her family.