The Lambes on New Bond Street

Opposite Clifford Street

The Lambes lived on two locations on New Bond Street, and they lived through one re-numbering of the street. Their address consequently went from 153 to 143 to 149 New Bond Street.

The earliest advertisement I have found for the Lambe's business begins as follows:¹

MINERAL Water just imported, fresh Pyrmont, Seltzer, and Spa Waters from the Poution Spring, from Lambe and Co. at their Warehouse in New Bond Street, facing Clifford Street;...

The Lambes' addresses on New Bond Street can be best understood with reference to an image of detail of the Richard Horwood map from 1799,² shown below, which has house numbers marked on it:

First, notice that the location on Bond Street (as New Bond Steet was sometimes called) that faces Clifford Street is number 153. Subsequent advertisements confirmed that the Lambes' warehouse address was 153 New Bond Street.³ Second, notice that St. George Hanover Square (marked as "St. George's Ch." in the top centre of the map section) is only a short distance away from the Lambes' warehouse. This was the church in whose records the birth of Alfred Lambe was recorded.

Moving After Twenty-One Years

Next, consider the following text from the end of one of the Lambes' advertisements in 1792:⁴

...N.B. The Nobility and Gentry are earnestly requested to be particular in directing their servants to Lambe's Mineral Water Warehouse, No. 143, New Bond-street, the fourth house from Bruton-street (removed from facing Clifford-street, where he carried on the business for twenty-one years) or to his Warehouse, No. 2, Leadenhall-street, where they may depend on their orders being immediately executed.

This paragraph confirms my conclusion that the Lambe business began on New Bond Street in 1771, and shows that the Lambes moved to number 143 in 1792. On the map above, 143 New Bond Street is indeed the fourth door north of Bruton Street (whose label is cut off from this section of the map, but which begins opposite from where Conduit Street meets New Bond Street).

Later, an advertisement by Alfred Boydell Lambe also claimed to be four doors from Bruton Street.⁵ By then, the address was 149 New Bond Street, so there must have been a street re-numbering. Today's 149 New Bond Street is still four door spaces north of Bruton street, although the first three door spaces are all part of the corner shop.

A Dignity of Appearance

The Lambes' house seems beautiful today, which you can judge for yourself from the pictures elsewhere on this website. It was also admired at the time they lived in it, despite a fishmongers located next door,⁶ at least based on a contributor's comments to an archetectural journal. In 1835, a writer said the following in a letter to the editor of The Archetectural Magazine:⁷

You mention Mr. Fearon's house in Bond Street as displaying dignity of appearance. I apprehend you mean the house occupied by a wine merchant (Lambe, I think, is the name) a few doors southward, which presents a fine elevation; while Mr. Fearon's, above the ground floor, is plain brick, and the shop front has no particular merit that I can discover.

Their house at 149 New Bond Street seems to have stood the test of time.

Footnotes

¹Advertisement for Lambe & Co., Public Advertiser, London: December 13, 1771.

²Horwood, Richard, Detail of Map of London, Westminster and Southwark, 1799, www.motco.com, accessed March 20, 2009.

³See, for example, Advertisement for J. Lambe, World, London: May 14, 1790.

⁴Advertisement for J. Lambe, Public Advertiser, London: May 10, 1792.

⁵Advertisement for A. B. Lambe, The Times, London: October 23, 1840.

⁶Morris, Jan, Fisher's Face, London: Viking, 1995, p. 18.

⁷Loudon, John Claudius (ed.), "Retrospective Criticism" in The Archetectural Magazine, vol. 2, November 1835, London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman; p. 519.