(from German Historical Institute London, 1976-2001, London 2002, pp 39-45)

The history of the house starts just after the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660. At that time London was going through a phase of rapid growth. The return of the Court, an ever-increasing number of parliamentary sessions and an upswing in trade attracted more and more people to move permanently to the capital, amongst them many upper-class professionals and nobles. The most sought-after residential areas were not, of course, in the City, which had become very crowded, but in the more generous and modern suburbs in the north and west. Those to profit most from the increased demand were the aristocratic landowners in London's outer suburbs, who could now offer for building land that had hitherto been used for agriculture, if at all. One of the first to recognise such an opportunity was Thomas Wriothesley (1607-1667), fourth Earl of Southampton and Charles II’s Lord Treasurer. During the 1650s he had already erected Southampton House on the fields of Bloomsbury as a magnificent city residence on the edge of the urban development. Just a year after the Restoration he started to landscape Bloomsbury Square, which Southampton House bordered to the north.

What emerged in the course of the next few years was one of London's earliest squares, after Covent Garden and Lincoln's Inn Fields, the model for numerous other squares that were to be created over the next decade: a regularly shaped open space, bordered by roads meeting at right angles, and lined with symmetrical rows of handsome houses with gardens to the rear, all part of a lively neighbourhood consisting of other, smaller streets, shops and a church. However, Bloomsbury Square, or Southampton Square as it was originally called after its founder, did not only set the standard as far as urban development was concerned. It is also a good example of the procedures for buying and selling building land that were to be typical of London in the centuries to come. Since the Earl of Southampton, like all aristocratic landowners, was only allowed to sell his property in exceptional circumstances, he had been leasing individual plots since 1661 to building contractors prepared to take a risk. Rents for the plots were initially fairly low, but were increased by mutual agreement later on. The contractors constructed the buildings at their own expense and were responsible for selling them when ready. The leases, which stipulated exactly what the facades should look like, were for 31 or 42 years. When they expired the landowner took possession of the buildings.

This rather unusual procedure obviously benefited both sides. At the time of his death one third of the Earl of Southampton's annual income came from rents paid for his property in London. The speculators, on the other hand, were investing in lucrative buildings, since after all in the first century of its existence Bloomsbury Square was one of the most desirable residential areas in the city. It fulfilled all requirements: the houses satisfied refined taste, the area was considered as the healthiest in London, being near to the countryside and with good air-quality, and the location also proved very favourable as regards transport. Both Westminster, the political centre, and the City, the hub of commerce and banking, could be reached quite easily. What is more, the Inns of Court and the city's major hospitals were in the immediate vicinity. For this reason, until well into the 18th century- many residents of the square belonged to the professional classes, with a preponderance of lawyers and doctors. To mention just a few: Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice under George III and a famous jurist, and the doctors Hans Sloane and John Radcliffe, both of whom found their place in history as generous patrons. The latter's fortune financed the Radcliffe Library and Infirmary in Oxford, while Sloane's collection of artefacts formed the basis of the British Museum's exhibits. In the square's early years it was also occupied by many members of the lower nobility and even a few top aristocrats. Even at that time, however, adjacent Great Russell Street was considered to be the most distinguished address. The houses there were broader, had bigger gardens and enjoyed, to the north, an uninterrupted view of Hampstead Hill and Highgate. One of the buildings, Montague House, later the home of the British Museum, was even reputed to be the most beautiful noble seat in London.

The distinguished character of Great Russell Street seems to have extended to the area on the northwest corner of the Square, where 17 Bloomsbury Square stands today. In any case, all the owners and occupiers in its first century belonged to the nobility. We do not know, however, whether one building originally covered the entire space on which the house now stands (17 Bloomsbury Square and 72/73 Great Russell Street), or whether there were two or more houses. If that were the case, however, they must have been made into one at a very early stage. All that we can tell from the records is that at that time there were already two separate entrances, one in Great Russell Street and one in the Square. To this extent the plots were an exception amongst the properties surrounding the square in that they were leased as "fee-farms". They thus became de facto, though not de jure, the property of the tenants.

The first owner we encounter in the records is Sir William Jones, Charles II’s first Attorney General, to whom the house was given by the Earl of Southampton. He was followed by Sir John Brown-low, who in turn sold the building to George Compton (1664-1727), the fourth Earl of Northampton, for £4,500. Compton, who refurbished the house in 1687/88, used it as his town house until his death. Via his widow Elizabeth, whom he married just a year before he died, the house eventually came into the possession of the Rushout family. It was occupied first by Sir John Rushout (1684-1775) and then by his son of the same name (1739-1800), the first Baron Northwick. It was then, however, that the fate of No. 17 was to change dramatically.

In the 1770s a new building boom had started in London that was to go on until the early 19th century. It offered skilful investors the promise of easy money. Rushout jun. therefore decided to give up using his inheritance as a family residence and to make it into an object of speculative investment. In 1777 he negotiated a contract with a then completely unknown young architect called John Nash, who was to reconstruct the corner building and erect houses on the hitherto undeveloped land running along Great Russell Street (today 66-71). The agreement took the same form as those leases that had been the norm since the Earl of Southampton's time. Rushout retained ownership of the land, with the prospect of a considerable sum in rent, while Nash was responsible for reconstructing the corner house and erecting the new houses, but also had the right to sell them on the open market. Things were made more difficult for Nash, however, by the fact that all the building work had to be completed within 18 months. Otherwise he faced a heavy fine. Despite the time constrictions Nash completed the project in style. Within the period allowed he built six new houses on Great Russell Street and converted the corner building, which had long since been one single house, into two separate houses, one with an entrance in Great Russell Street, and the other in Bloomsbury Square. The interiors of the two houses were also refurbished.

The two magnificent staircases crowned by glass cupolas can probably be attributed to Nash. They survived later refurbishment and give a clear impression of the two architectonic units that came into being in 1778/9. Nash undertook major alterations to the frontage. Above the arched and rusticated ground floor, he placed Corinthian-style columns and above them a moulded cornice. He also plastered the walls, an extremely early example of this technique. Until then the houses on Bloomsbury Square, like most other buildings in London at the time, displayed fairly simple brick architecture. It was not until the 1770s that stucco gradually became fashionable. One of the first firms to make use of the new technique was that of the two famous archi-tects and interior designers Robert and James Adam. They were commissioned by Nash to render the frontage of No. 17, for which they charged £490. It is not clear, however, whether they were also responsible for the wonderful ceilings on the first floor, in what are now the Common Room and Conference Room. There is no evidence that they were. Some literature seems to suggest that Nash himself created the ceilings. The original colour scheme is likewise not known, since the ceilings were painted over in white in the 19th century and were not coloured again until the renovations of the 1960s. The present colour scheme is modelled on the 18th century since the restorers used the old colour pattern books in the British Museum.

The outcome of all these alterations was an imposing building consisting of two houses behind a splendidly uniform frontage in neo-classical style. For Nash, however, the whole enterprise, the first in his spectacular career, ended in disaster. In 1783 he was declared bankrupt. He had had to borrow money to build the houses, and was unable to sell them quickly enough. For a long time there was no interest in the new houses in Great Russell Street, one of which (71) Nash himself occupied between 1778 and 1781, or in the two corner houses. The new houses remained empty until 1781. The smaller of the corner houses was not bought until 1783, and the larger one was still uninhabited in 1800.

This lack of interest is easily explained by the number of houses now available due to the building boom. However there was undoubtedly also a social decline in the whole square in the late 18th century. Bloomsbury Square lost its attraction, at least as far as the nobility was concerned. As the centre of London's society shifted westward they left their houses in the square. In 1800 the former Southampton House, which had been called Bedford House since it was transferred to the Russell family in the late 17th century, was actually pulled down and replaced by the row of houses still standing at the northern edge of the square today. Bloomsbury Square lost its aristocratic ambience and was transformed more and more into a purely middle-class residential area. This also applies to the property on the north-west corner of the square. Nash's division of the building into two houses was already a departure from the grand living standards of the nobility, and more in line with more modest middle-class dimensions. And indeed, in the decades around 1800 there is only evidence of middle-class occupants of No. 17. In 1810, for example, the lawyer John Edwards, by coincidence a relative of John Nash, lived there. Next door, in 72 Great Russell Street, were his firm's chambers, Edwards & Lyon.

Around the middle of the 19th century the square underwent yet another change. The middle-class residents were gradually pushed out by firms, foundations, associations or semi-official institutions. Just fifty years later, offices had replaced homes in more or less the entire square. This trend first came to No. 17 at the end of 1841. The then owner, John Mickle, who was to bequeath the building to his brother George, leased it to the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain for a sum of £240. This society had been founded on 15 April 1841 at a public meeting in the Crown and Anchor pub, with the aim of: "improving the chemist's professional reputation by better training". It controlled access to the pharmaceutical professions and set the professional standards, which anyone embarking on such a career had to meet by passing one of the Society's examinations. The Society ran a pharmaceutical school where pupils prepared for the examination, and this, along with the administration, was housed in the new building. The first lecture in No. 17 was given on 16 February 1842, although the Society had already moved in in January of that year.

As the Society grew - until 1862 it had even had to share the premises with the Royal Literary Fund - the need for space increased. The first expansion occurred in 1857. George Rushout (1811-1887), the third Baron Northwick, gave the society a 90 year lease, not only for 17 Bloomsbury Square, but also for No. 72 (today 72/73) Great Russell Street. It thus had the use of the entire complex on the northwest corner of Bloomsbury Square. When Jacob Bell, one of the Society's founding fathers, died in 1859 and left it £ 2000, plans for extending the building further could be implemented. An additional storey was built, to make room for new laboratories. This explains why the ceilings on the third floor are higher than those on the second, which must still have been servants' quarters in the 18th century. As part of the building work carried out in 1860 the porch was also added. Thus it was not until the 19th century that the house took on the shape that is so familiar today. At that time the interior housed the Society's library and a small pharmaceutical museum, lecture and examination rooms, various meeting rooms and offices, as well as several laboratories. Around the middle of the century the main room on the first floor of No. 17, for example, which had originally been used as a lecture hall and then as an examination room, was turned into a histological laboratory. Incidentally in 1855/56 Theodor Fontane, who at that time was writing his "Deutsch-Englische Korrespondenz", regularly went in and out of the Society's premises. He used to visit his friend Julius Schweitzer who was working for the Society, and who was allowed to live at No. 17. There they celebrated a merry "German Christmas" together.

On 30 July 1958 the Pharmaceutical Society, which in 1886 had leased an additional neighbouring house (today 15 Bloomsbury Square), acquired the freehold from the trustees of the Bedford Estates, having been the building's only tenant for more than 100 years. The Bedford Estates had taken over the rights of ownership from Lady Northwick's trustees in 1899. Acquisition of the freehold coincided with a fundamental restructuring of the Society. After the Second World War, during which the individual departments had been evacuated to Cardiff and Derbyshire, a process was initiated whereby the School of Pharmacy was gradually incorporated into the University of London. From 1955 onwards the laboratories were therefore moved from Bloomsbury Square to a new building in Brunswick Square, also in Bloomsbury. When the move had been completed in 1960 the Society refurbished the building as its headquarters. At around this time offers were re-ceived from the USA for the stuccoed ceilings on the first floor, presumably on the assumption that they were the work of the Adam brothers, who were prominent in American architectural history. They were supposed to be dismantled and shipped across the Atlantic. Holborn Council, however, would have none of it, which is why the magnificent ceiling decorations are still intact to this day.

In 1976 the government placed a compulsory purchase order on No. 17 Bloomsbury Square and on various other houses in the immediate vicinity. The intention was to provide space for the expansion of the British Museum. However, the government's plans were scuppered by resistance from the Bloomsbury Society, and the buildings had to be resold by auction. On 29 February 1980, the ownership rights to 17 Bloomsbury Square passed to the London Trust, which in turn sold them on to the Volkswagen Foundation in April of that year. In the meantime it had been determined that the house was not to be used for commercial purposes. The Volkswagen Foundation took great care to recreate the character of the house, which had stood empty for four years, had been occupied by squatters, and was in a state of disrepair. The brilliance of the magnificent rooms on the first floor was restored and today they house the library, Conference Room and Common Room of the GHIL, which moved into the building on 2 December 1982: the last tenant so far in a history of more than 300 years.

Source: German Historical Institute London, 1976-2001, London 2002, pp 39-45.