Mount Street is well known to London’s cab drivers. With its beautiful 18th century Queen Anne architecture, it’s home to expensive restaurants, fashion houses, jewellery shops and one of London’s finest hotels, The Connaught – a hotel so exclusive it was said you would need to show references to get a room there.
But before Mount Street was built in the 17th century, it was known as Mount’s Field and was part of Cromwell’s hastily built fortifications around the city in the English Civil war.
Most people know that London has a Roman Wall, but during the civil war of 1642-1649, fought between the King and the roundheads under Oliver Cromwell, a massive earth wall and ditch fortification – dwarfing the size of the Roman wall – was built to protect parliamentarian London from royalist attack. The wall ran from Wapping in the east to Hyde Park in the west, from Shoreditch in the north to Southwark in the south and was thought to be the largest fortification of its type in Europe. Over 100,000 men worked on the fortifications.
Much of the wall was made of massive earth banks. It would have been constructed by digging a deep ditch on the outside and piling the soil high to create a fortified mound or mount.
So where is the evidence of the wall today? Well, after the attack on London failed to materialise (the closest they got was a standoff in Turnham Green) the wall was pulled down and a mere ten years after the event, no evidence of it remained. Except for a street called Mount Street.
Footnote: During the civil war, the Hackney Carriage trade sided with Cromwell and after the war was won, was rewarded in 1654 with a seal of approval from Parliament, making it the oldest public transport system in the world.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia. Mount Street, London.
Source http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/51.50932/-0.15295