Tavistock Street

Tavistock-St., Covent-garden, is the first turning on the right hand in Southampton-street.

Tavistock-Street, Covent-Garden,—the first on the R. in Southampton-st. from 387, in the Strand.

Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, runs from Southampton Street to Wellington Street. Richard Leveridge, the celebrated singer, kept a tavern in this street after his retirement from the stage. Here he brought out "A Collection of Songs, with the Music by Mr. Leveridge. In two volumes. London: Engraved and Printed for the Author, in Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, 1727."

Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, was once the street of fashionable shops—what Bond Street was till lately, and what Bond Street and Regent Street together are now. I remember hearing an old lady say that in her young days the crowd of handsome equipages in Tavistock Street was considered one of the sights of London. I have had the curiosity to stride it. It is about 160 yards long, and before the footways were widened would have admitted three carriages abreast.—Walker, The Original, No. 3, June 3, 1835.

Returning thence the disappointed fleet
Anchors in Tavistock's fantastic street:
There under Folly's colours gaily rides
Where Humour points or veering Fashion guides.
Cumberland (Cradock, vol. iv. p. 262).

When he [Lord Thurlow] was young he would do the kindest things and at an expense to himself which at that time he could ill afford, and he w^d do them, too, in the most secret manner. I know not what is become of her now, but in those days there was a certain Miss Christian, the daughter, if I mistake not, of a Norfolk clergyman, who had been a friend of Thurlow's father. The girl was left pennyless, and he established her in Tavistock Street as a milliner, disbursing three hundred pounds to furnish a shop for her. I went with him to the house, and having seen her, am ready to swear that his motives were not, nor could be, of the amorous kind, for she was ugly to a wonder.—Cowper to Carwardine, June 11, 1792; Southey's Cowper, vol. vii. p. 127.

It is on such occasions snuff takers delight to solace themselves with a pinch of Thirty seven; and we accordingly do so in imagination at our friend Fliddon's in Tavistock Street, who is a higher kind of Lilly to the Indicator—our papers lying among the piquant snuffs, as those of our illustrious predecessor, the Tatler, did among Mr. Lilly's perfumes at the corner of Beaufort Buildings.—Leigh Hunt.

A large building used as a flower market has been erected on the north side of the street, but all that side west of the flower market now (1890) lies an open space.