Gower Street, Camden
An elegantly sombre Bloomsbury street connecting Bedford Square and Euston Road, with a northern extension continuing to Hampstead Road
The west side of Gower Street
Gower Street was built from the 1780s and retains one of London’s longest sets of unbroken Georgian terraces. Critics decried its ugliness and the landowners, the Bedford estate, later added some stuccoed entrances to relieve the brown-bricked gloom.
During the street’s development, a square was proposed near the northern end but the land was taken instead for what became University College London (UCL). The university was founded to provide an alternative to the Anglican-dominated colleges of Oxford and Cambridge and was nicknamed ‘the godless institution of Gower Street’. The Wilkins Building opened in 1828 and the university has since progressively expanded to consume most of the east side of the street and the land behind it.
University College Hospital opened on the west side of Gower Street in 1833, bringing surgeons and doctors to the residences nearby. The hospital was rebuilt in flamboyantly baroque style by Sir Alfred Waterhouse and his son Paul over the ten years to 1906. Now known as the Cruciform, this building became part of UCL’s teaching facilities in 1996. The hospital moved into a spectacular pair of new buildings on Euston Road in 2005.
Gower Street’s edifying museums make it a miniature South Kensington. UCL’s Petrie Museum (accessed from Malet Place) and Grant Museum of Zoology house Egyptian archaeology and natural history collections respectively, the latter featuring plenty of skeletons and mounted animals, including a marsupial wolf.
After drawing up a list of the pros and cons of marriage, Charles Darwin proposed to his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, and married her in 1839. The newlyweds moved into a house on Gower Street, but three years later Charles’s increasingly poor health prompted them to move to the country village of Downe.
The Pre-Raphaelite artist Simeon Solomon trained at his brother’s Gower Street studio, and had his first picture exhibited at the Royal Academy when he was only 18 years old. His later arrest for indecent exposure prompted a decline into alcoholism and poverty. Other Gower Street residents have included the engineer Richard Trevithick and the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini.
‘Gower Street dialect’ was a spooneristic kind of slang spoken by local medical students in the latter part of the 19th century.
