Marylebone (usually , also ) is an area in London, England, and is located in the City of Westminster. It is in Central London and part of the West End. Oxford Street forms its southern boundary.
An ancient parish and latterly a metropolitan borough, it merged with the boroughs of Westminster and Paddington to form the new City of Westminster in 1965.
Marylebone station lies north-west of Charing Cross.
The area is also served by numerous tube stations: Baker Street, Bond Street, Edgware Road (Bakerloo line), Edgware Road (Circle, District and Hammersmith & City lines), Great Portland Street, Marble Arch, Marylebone, Oxford Circus, and Regent's Park.
History
Marylebone was an Ancient Parish formed to serve the manors (landholdings) of Lileston (in the west, which gives its name to modern Lisson Grove) and Tyburn in the east. The parish is likely to have been in place since at least the twelfth century and will have used the boundaries of the pre-existing manors. The boundaries of the parish were consistent from the late twelfth century to the creation of the Metropolitan Borough which succeeded it.Churches in the Landscape, Richard Morris, JM Dent and Sons 1989. Chapter 4 describes how the parish system was completed (bar a few exceptions) in the 12th century and new Canon Law made changes to boundaries very difficult and rare.
Toponymy The name Marylebone originates from an ancient hamlet located near today's Marble Arch, on the eastern banks of the Tyburn, where in 1400 a parish church dedicated to St Mary was built. Since the 12th century, the area had been synonymous with the Tyburn gallows, where public executions regularly took place at the crossroads of the Tyburn and old Roman road.
Eager to distance themselves from the notorious gallows, the villagers took inspiration from their new church and began calling the hamlet St Mary-burne ("the stream of St Mary", burne coming from the Anglo-Saxon word burna for a small stream). This stream rose further north in (Hampstead), eventually running along what became Marylebone Lane, which preserves its curve within the grid pattern."Maryburne rill", in Harrison's Description of England 1586, noted by Henry Benjamin Wheatley and Peter Cunningham, London Past and Present: its history, associations, and traditions, Volume 2, p. 509.
In the 17th century, under the influence of names like Mary-le-Bow, the French-derived preposition le appeared midway in the parish name, and eventually St Mary-le-bourne became St Marylebone. Other spelling iterations include Mariburn, Marybone, and in Samuel Pepys' diary, Marrowbone. The suggestion that the name derives from Marie la Bonne, or "Mary the Good", is not substantiated.
Manors of Tyburn and Lileston Both manors were mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086.London Encyclopaedia, Weinreb and Hibbert, 1983 Domesday recorded eight households in each manor,Domesday entry for Lisson https://opendomesday.org/place/TQ2782/lisson/Domesday entry for Tyburn https://opendomesday.org/place/TQ2780/marylebone/ implying a combined population of less than a hundred.
At Domesday the Manor of Lilestone was valued at 60 shillings and owned by a woman called Ediva. Tyburn was a possession of the Nunnery of Barking Abbey and valued at 52 shillings. The ownership of both manors was the same as it had been before the Conquest.
Lilestone became the property of the Knights Templar until their suppression in 1312. It then passed to the Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, whose name is the origin of the place name St John's Wood.
Early in the 13th century Tyburn was held by Robert de Vere, 3rd Earl of Oxford. At the end of the 15th century Thomas Hobson bought up the greater part of the manor; in 1544 his son Thomas exchanged it with Henry VIII,Wheatley and Cunningham, p. 509. who enclosed the northern part of the manor as a deer park, the distant origin of Regent's Park. Lilestone Manor also passed into the hands of the Crown at this time.London Encyclopaedia - entry for Marylebone states that both Manors came into the hands of the Crown at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries.
Tyburn manor remained with the Crown until the southern part was sold in 1611 by James I, who retained the deer park, to Edward Forest,'The Regent's Park', Old and New London 5 (1878:262–286) . Retrieved 3 July 2010. who had held it as a fixed rental under Elizabeth I. Forest's manor of Marylebone then passed by marriage to the Austen family. The deer park, Marylebone Park Fields, was let out in small holdings for hay and dairy produce.B. Weinreb and C. Hibbert, eds (1995), The London Encyclopedia, Macmillan
Shifting parish church
The Ancient Parish's church, St Marylebone Parish Church, has been rebuilt several times at various locations within the parish. The earliest known church dedicated to St John the Evangelist was established by Barking Abbey, which held Manor of Tyburn, at an unknown date, but probably sometime in the 12th century.Church website https://www.stmarylebone.org/information/history This church was located on the north side of Oxford Street, probably near the junction with Marylebone Lane. This site was subject to regular robbery and in 1400 a new church was built, around 900 metres further north. and given the name St Mary by the Bourne.Daniel Lysons, 'Marylebone', in The Environs of London: Volume 3, County of Middlesex (London, 1795), pp. 242–279. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/london-environs/vol3/pp242-279 [accessed 3 April 2021].London Encyclopaedia, Weinreb and Hibbert, 1983 This church was rebuilt in 1740 with a new building erected a little further north in 1817.
Urbanisation In 1710, John Holles, Duke of Newcastle, purchased the manor for £17,500,Wheatley and Cunningham; they note the annual rents brought in £900. and his daughter and heir, Lady Henrietta Cavendish Holles, by her marriage to Edward Harley, Earl of Oxford, passed it into the family of the Earl of Oxford, one of whose titles was Lord Harley of Wigmore. She and the earl, realising the need for fashionable housing north of the Oxford Road (now Oxford St), commissioned the surveyor and builder John Prince to draw a master plan that set Cavendish Square in a rational grid system of streets.
The Harley heiress Lady Margaret Cavendish Harley married William, 2nd Duke of Portland, and took the property, including Marylebone High Street, into the Bentinck family. Such place names in the neighbourhood as Cavendish Square and Portland Place reflect the Dukes of Portland landholdings and Georgian-era developments there. In 1879 the fifth Duke died without issue and the estate passed through the female line to his sister, Lucy Joan Bentinck, widow of the 6th Baron Howard de Walden.
Most of the Manor of Lileston was acquired by Sir William Portman in 1554, and much of this was developed by his descendants as the Portman Estate in the late 1700s. Both estates have aristocratic antecedents and are still run by members of the aforementioned families. The Howard de Walden Estate owns, leases and manages the majority of the of real estate in Marylebone which comprises the area from Marylebone High Street in the west to Robert Adam's Portland Place in the east and from Wigmore Street in the south to Marylebone Road in the north.The Howard de Walden Estate
Social history In the 18th century the area was known for the raffish entertainments in Marylebone Gardens, the scene of bear-baiting and prize fights by members of both sexes, and for the duelling grounds in Marylebone Fields.Wheatley and Cunningham, p. 511. The Marylebone Cricket Club, for many years the governing body of world cricket, was formed in 1787 and initially based at Dorset Fields before moving a short distance to its current home at Lord's Cricket Ground in 1814. Lord's is also home to Middlesex County Cricket Club and the England and Wales Cricket Board, and is one of several home venues for the England national men's and women's teams. The ground is marketed as the Home of Cricket by the MCC.
Marylebone has some Beatles heritage. As well as Paul McCartney's residence at the Wimpole Street home of Jane Asher's family, John Lennon had a flat at 34 Montagu Square. The original Apple Corps headquarters were at 95 Wigmore Street and the former headquarters of EMI (since demolished) were in Manchester Square; it was here that the famous photograph of the four band members looking over a balcony (used as the cover of the album "Please Please Me" was taken.
Coat of arms
The Borough of St Marylebone was granted a coat of arms by the College of Arms in 1901.Geoffrey Briggs, Civic & Corporate Heraldry, London, 1971 The crest includes the Virgin Mary wearing a silver robe with a light blue mantle, holding the infant Jesus, dressed in gold. The wavy light blue bars represent the River Tyburn while the gold roses and lilies are taken from the arms of Barking Abbey, which held the Manor of Tyburn and first established the parish church. The version used by the Abbey was placed against a red border, and some versions of Marylebone's arms have made extensive use of red. The roses and lilies ultimately derive from the legend that when Mary's tomb was opened it contained those flowers.
The motto "Fiat secundum Verbum Tuum" is Latin for "let it be according to thy word", a phrase used in the Gospel of Luke.
Later administrative history The Metropolitan Borough of St Marylebone was a metropolitan borough of the County of London between 1899 and 1965, after which, with the Metropolitan Borough of Paddington and the Metropolitan Borough of Westminster it was merged into the City of Westminster. The Metropolitan Borough inherited the boundaries of the Ancient Parish which had been fixed since at least the 12th century. Marylebone Town Hall was completed in 1920.
20th century Marylebone was the scene of the Balcombe Street siege in 1975, when Provisional Irish Republican Army terrorists held two people hostage for almost a week.
Streets
Some of Marylebone's major streets form a grid pattern such as Gloucester Place, Baker Street, Wimpole Street, Harley Street and Portland Place, with smaller mews between the major streets.
Mansfield Street is a short continuation of Chandos Street built by the Adam brothers in 1770, on a plot of ground which had been underwater. Most of its houses are fine buildings with exquisite interiors, which if put on the market now would have an expected price in excess of £10 million. At Number 13 lived religious architect John Loughborough Pearson who died in 1897, and designer of Castle Drogo and New Delhi Sir Edwin Lutyens, who died in 1944. Immediately across the road at 61 New Cavendish Street lived Natural History Museum creator Alfred Waterhouse.
Queen Anne Street is an elegant cross-street which unites the northern end of Chandos Street with Welbeck Street. The painter J. M. W. Turner moved to 47 Queen Anne Street in 1812 from 64 Harley Street, now divided into numbers 22 and 23, and owned the house until his death in 1851. It was known as "Turner's Den", becoming damp, dilapidated, dusty, dirty, with dozens of Turner's works of art now in the National Gallery scattered throughout the house, walls covered in tack holes and a drawing room inhabited by cats with no tails.
During the same period a few hundred yards to the east, Chandos House in Chandos Street was used as the Austro-Hungarian Embassy and residence of the fabulously extravagant Ambassador Prince Paul Anton III Esterhazy, seeing entertainment on a most lavish scale. The building is one of the finest surviving Adam houses in London, and now lets rooms.