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Cato Street
Cato Street is a narrow street in the western part of Marylebone, running south from Crawford Place in the W1H 5 postcode area. It sits within the Portman Estate's westernmost residential grid, close to Edgware Road and the Molyneux Street Conservation Area, an enclave of modest early nineteenth century terraced housing laid out in the first decade of the 1800s.
The street is principally known for the Cato Street Conspiracy of February 1820, one of the most dramatic episodes in Regency-era British political history. On the night of 23 February 1820, a group of radical conspirators known as the Spencean Philanthropists assembled in a stable on the street with a plan to assassinate the entire British cabinet at a dinner. Their leader was Arthur Thistlewood, who acted in response to economic hardship following the Napoleonic Wars, the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, and the repressive Six Acts. The plot was betrayed by an informant, government agent George Edwards. Police and soldiers raided the stable; Thistlewood fatally wounded an officer during the confrontation. Five conspirators, including Thistlewood and William Davidson, were executed outside Newgate Prison on 1 May 1820, the last prisoners to be publicly beheaded in Britain. The building at 1A Cato Street carries a blue plaque, erected in 1977, and received listed building status in 1974.
The street today is a quiet residential address of terraced houses. Its proximity to Portman Square and the broader estate grid belies how different its social character was two centuries ago.
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