Wellington Street is a street located in Covent Garden, Westminster. It connects Bow Street, Russell Street, Tavistock Street, Exeter Street, Strand and Lancaster Place. The street, first established in 1834, takes its name from Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington.Fairfield, S. The Streets of London – A dictionary of the names and their origins, p336
Location Wellington Street runs south east to north west from Strand to Bow Street. The nearest tube station is Covent Garden.
Buildings The Lyceum Theatre is located on Wellington Street, though only its portico is original.Pope, W. Macqueen and Ronald Mayes. "The Lyceum Theatre, Wellington Street, London", Arthur Lloyd, accessed 16 October 2015 The theatre and many of the street's other buildings are Grade II-listed, including the block of terrace houses (Nos. 20-26), now with ground-floor shop fronts, which were designed in 1833–35 by Samuel Beazley.'Buildings in Wellington Street', London Picture Archive The Other House Covent Garden (Nos. 25-31) is a hotel incorporating a block of six properties, three of them Grade-II listed.
18 Wellington Street, on the corner of Exeter Street, was built in 1839 as Charles Frederick Bielefeld's papier-mâché works. It was originally designed by Sydney Smirke, but rebuilt in 1863–64 by Charles Octavius Parnell for the Victoria Sporting Club, a gentlemen’s gaming club. Pevsner described its style as "a very lush Victorian Baroque".Nikolaus Pevsner, Bridget Cherry. London: The cities of London and Westminster (1973), p. 391 From 1991 until September 2026 it housed Christopher's Restaurant.'Christopher’s to close its Covent Garden home', On In London, 24 September, 2026 The Old Bell pub, built in 1835, is a Grade II listed public house at 16 Exeter Street and 23 Wellington Street.
19th Century publishing From the 1840s, the street was an important centre for publishing. Between 1843 and 1853, many newspapers and periodicals, including The Athenaeum (at No. 20, where its publisher John Francis also lived), The Critic (first at 19 Wellington Street North and later at 10 Wellington Street), The Examiner, Punch, The Spectator, The Morning Post and the serial edition of London Labour and the London Poor all had their offices on Wellington Street. The offices and private apartments of Charles Dickens (Household Words and All the Year Round) were at No. 26, where there is a blue plaque.'Charles Dickens - WC2', London Remembers The office of Henry Mayhew (London Poor) and G.W.M. Reynolds (Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper) were all in close proximity.Mary L. Shannon. Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street, Routledge (2019)
References
Further reading Southampton Street and Tavistock Street Area: Wellington Street. British History Online