Harrowby Street
Harrowby Street runs east from Edgware Road toward Seymour Place in the north-west corner of Marylebone, within the Portman Estate and carrying a W1H postcode. It is one of the quieter residential streets on the estate's western edge, largely composed of Georgian and early Victorian terraced houses.
The street is named after Dudley Ryder, 1st Earl of Harrowby (1762 to 1847), a prominent Tory statesman who served as Foreign Secretary and Lord President of the Council. Ryder has an involuntary claim to historical notoriety: in February 1820 he was among the cabinet ministers targeted by the Cato Street Conspiracy, a plot to assassinate the entire cabinet at a dinner. The conspiracy was foiled before it could be carried out, and the would-be assassins were arrested at their meeting place in nearby Cato Street.
Harrowby Street was developed as part of the Portman Estate's late eighteenth-century expansion across the western portion of Marylebone, which the Portman family had held since Sir William Portman first acquired the land in the sixteenth century. The estate now covers 110 acres and 68 streets. The street retains a domestic scale, with three and four-storey brick townhouses that reflect the pattern typical of the Portman Square neighbourhood's residential streets.
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