Brunswick Street West renumbering

For local historians or anyone wishing to research the history of a particular house, knowing which number house various documents refer to is key to ensuring you’re studying the right place.  Unfortunately, for various reasons, streets are occasionally renumbered over time.  This piece aims to explain the numbering changes around Brunswick Street West.

In general, the east side of Brunswick Street West was developed first in order to provide the stables at the rear of the grand houses in Brunswick Square.  There were originally no buildings on the east side of the street with the land being marked as reserved for general purposes in Busby’s original 1826 plan. 

The numbering of the stables on the east side of Brunswick Street West followed the numbering of the houses in Brunswick Square for which they were built to serve so, for example, 46 Brunswick Street West would have been the stables for 46 Brunswick Square.

Note that the houses in Brunswick Square on the west side, backing onto Brunswick Street West, were formally renumbered by increasing their numbers by two at the end of 1834 and, presumably, those stables which had been built followed the same renumbering.

When development started on the main stretch of the west side of the street, those buildings adopted a separate ‘standard’ to the stable-side, broadly numbering from 1 at the top increasing sequentially down that side of the street.  In the 1850s when the Town Hall was built at the top, the Town Hall assumed number 1 as it had been built over the previously demolished number 1.

Travelling south in Brunswick Street West, the first spur towards Lansdowne Place did feature a few buildings on Busby’s original plan but, judging by their treatment in the street directories, they appear not to have been numbered.  Perhaps they didn’t need numbers as they were used, and presumably known as, a bootmaker, greengrocers, a pub and Lansdowne Cottage, behind which were the livery stables.

The street was formally renumbered in 1924 to the current standard starting at number 1 in the bottom right-hand spur and increasing up the street with even numbers on the left and odd numbers on the right.

The map shows the current numbers of Brunswick Street West in BLACK with the pre-1925 numbers in (BLUE).

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