3-101-143 - "Royal Academy of Arts, London"/Heritage Images

Old House, Queen Square, Bloomsbury, c1883. "Elmes...states that a "large mansion on the South side of Queen Square, Bloomsbury, now divided, is also by Wren, who built it for Lord Newcastle..." The design may well be Wren's, but Elmes's book is the only one in which I have been able to find any ascription of the design to the great architect, or any mention of a Newcastle House in Queen Square. It is, moreover, clear from the arrangement of the windows that the house must have been built as we now see it; it cannot have been afterwards divided into two...it would appear that Elmes confused Queen Square, Bloomsbury, with Queen Street, Lincoln's-Inn-Fields, and Wren with Winde or Wynne, the architect of Newcastle House." Description by Alfred Marks. Built in the reign of Queen Anne and named after her, Walford [Old and New London] describes Queen Square as once a fashionable area and inhabited by private families but gradually from the mid-nineteenth century this changed, as houses became hospitals and other charitable institutions. A short time after Dixon's photograph was taken, number 41 became the Italian Hospital.