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A plush 19th-century suburb with interwar augmentation, situated on the north-west side of Regent’s Park. The name was
recorded in Latin form at the end of the 13th century, when the land came into the possession of the Order of the Hospital
of St John of Jerusalem. The English name was first mentioned in 1524. Henry Samuel Eyre, a London wine merchant, purchased
the estate from the Earl of Chesterfield in 1732. St John’s Wood did not evolve in the same way as many other smart
parts of London. Its low-lying situation, poorly served by roads, did not attract gentlemen’s seats and yet the Eyre
family were keen to profit from its development, unlike more protective and resistant landowners elsewhere. In 1794 they commissioned
a plan that would have seen St John’s Wood laid out in the same style as the spa town of Bath but this was stymied by
recession during the Napoleonic Wars. To the south of the Eyre estate, the area around St John’s Wood High Street was
built up as Portland Town in the early 19th century, with housing for the working classes. Thomas Lord’s cricket ground
moved from Dorset Square to St John’s Wood Road in 1814. The Eyre family laid roads across their estate in the 1820s
and agreed building contracts with a number of small firms, who did most of their work in the 1840s. Standards were kept high
and the new inhabitants were bankers, merchants and gentlemen of independent means. The houses had so many servants that mews
were needed to accommodate the overflow. Later phases of building, especially towards the west, were less exclusive. St John’s
Wood was well-served by omnibuses from the late 1850s, and Marlborough Road station opened in 1868. Portland Town was redeveloped
from the 1890s, with a mix of institutional buildings and mansion blocks, together with shopping parades on the High Street.
Elsewhere, blocks of private flats replaced many of the early Victorian houses during the 1930s. A new station was built in
1939 and opened as St John’s Wood, whereupon Marlborough Road station closed. After World War II the municipal authorities
rebuilt so extensively in the north and west that some parts of the former Eyre estate are no longer thought of as being in
St John’s Wood. However, the surviving Victorian properties and the classiest of the flats and mansion blocks form a
charming and prestigious enclave, which reaches its acme on Avenue Road.
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