More from St John’s Wood – and this next photograph is of the entrance to a large detached house at 38 Marlborough Place, St John’s Wood, where a blue plaque informs us that ‘THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 1825-1895 Biologist Lived Here’.
Huxley was born into a middle-class family in Ealing, but when the school at which his father taught mathematics closed the family were plunged into poverty, and he had to leave school aged 10, only two years after his education had begun. But he determined to teach himself, and did so with great effect, becoming one of the most knowledgeable men in Britain over a very wide range of subjects, and probably the leading specialist in comparative anatomy of his era.
But he is now best-known for his defence of Charles Darwin whose theory of evolution published in On the Origin of Species aroused considerable controversy, particular from religious figures, and Huxley’s defence of Darwin in an 1860 Oxford public debate with Bishop “Soapy Sam” Samuel Wilberforce (one of William’s sons) led to him being nicknamed after his death as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’.
The door to the street from the covered path to the front door was open, allowing me to stand outside and take this picture showing the path and canopy as well as the mosaic on the flooring.
I moved back a few feet and a smidgeon to my left to take another picture of the house, which gives a better idea of the covered path to the street and also shows the plaque for Huxley.
In 1988 this was the Marlborough Family Service of the Bloomsbury Health Authority, a pioneering institution for child-protection cases, school-based interventions and family therapy, founded here by Dr Joshua Bierer in 1946 as the Marlborough Day Hospital, the first social psychotherapy centre in the world. It seems to have been closed and sold off around 2018.
The door to the front garden at 59 Marlborough Place was shut, so I couldn’t see inside, but the gateposts has two rather grand eagles still present. This property, built in around 1840 was extensively refurbished in 2013 and you can see a large set of pictures on the web. It sold in 2016 for £14,900,000.
The Grade II listing has a very lengthy text and describes it as “good example of the early mid-C19 semi-detached villas erected on the Eyre Estate, are of special architectural interest on account of their early semi-detached format and their architectural form and detailing expressed on their front elevations.”
The listing text also mentions that between around 1950 and 1990 it was divided into four flats, one of which was for some time the home of composer Benjamin Britten.
This Grade II listed Tudor Gothic detached house at 48 Abbey Road dates from around 1840.
The doorway of another house in a similar stye in the area, possibly in Carlton Hill.
Just around the corner in Abbey Road is the New London Synagogue.
This was the site of the first Jewish community to be established in 1876 by the new United Synagogue which had been formed in 1870; the permanent building for St. John’s Wood (United) Synagogue, now Grade II listed, was opened in 1882. Its architect Hyman Henry Collins, the City of London District Surveyor, designed eight synagogues in London, but all but this have been demolished.
St John’s Wood gained large Jewish population when people moved out of the East End in the 1930s and 1950s, but in 1964 the congregation had closed and the building was being sold off for demolition. It was saved when followers of Rabbi Dr Louis Jacobs who had been refused employment in the United Synagogue’s New West End Synagogue due to allegations of heresy secretly formed a shell company to buy it. They set up a new congregation with him as rabbi, the first in what became known as the Masorti movement in the UK.