154 New Cavendish Street (formerly 7 Upper Marylebone Street), 30 July 2025
An Open, Illustrated Letter To The Thomas Paine Historical Association & English Heritage
Synopsis: Previous research by the Thomas Paine Society in the UK identified 148 New Cavendish Street (Highwood House) as the site of the house 7 Upper Marylebone Street, occupied by Thomas Paine while he wrote large chunks of The Right of Man. (See Barb Jacobson’s otherwise excellent article in Fitzrovia News from November 2010). However, my subsequent research (2022 and 2025) has uncovered incontrovertible evidence that the numbering of Upper Marylebone Street in Horwood’s Plan, upon which the 148 New Cavendish Street theory is based, was in error. In fact, 7 Upper Marylebone Street is now 154 New Cavendish Street, one of the three original Georgian houses still standing on that block. That house should be eligible for an English Heritage Blue Plaque in honour of Thomas Paine. I urge The Thomas Paine Historical Association to liaise with English Heritage over this matter.
My father’s family settled at 4 Upper Marylebone Street a few years after arriving in this country. My father was born in that house in 1919, as was his brother Michael a couple of years later. The “Harris” family moved south around 1930.
I started to take a look at my family’s history in 2022 and wrote a couple of pieces about it. One rather tongue in cheek piece about the difficulties of searching the 1921 census…
…the other, following a bit more research, tracing the family’s first migrant steps in this country, from Notting Hill to Fitrovia via Soho…
While trawling all the available information sources for Upper Marylebone Street, now the eastern end of New Cavendish Street, I uncovered electoral rolls from 1935 and 1939. These provided incontrovertible evidence of the renaming and renumbering, as that was done between those two electoral rolls, as almost every house in that block (ironically, the one my family had lived in was empty in 1939) had at least one or two occupants who spanned those electoral roll years.
Mapping the two rolls:
- 1 Upper Marylebone Street became 168 New Cavendish Street – see Emma Chandler and Minnie Morris
- 2 Upper Marylebone Street became 166 New Cavendish Street – see John and Anna Bertha Sarah Wright
- 3 Upper Marylebone Street became 164 New Cavendish Street – see Charles & Clara Lohman and William Smith
- 4 Upper Marylebone Street became 162 New Cavendish Street – by inference, as empty in 1939
- 5 Upper Marylebone Street became 160 New Cavendish Street – by inference, as empty in 1935 and 1939
- 6a Upper Marylebone Street became 158 New Cavendish Street – see Dora Cante (Cawte) & Kathleen MacDonald
- 6 Upper Marylebone Street became 156 New Cavendish Street – see John William Hawkes & Pauline Hawkes
- 7 Upper Marylebone Street became 154 New Cavendish Street – see Hyman & Sara Gilbert, Charles & Florence Emily Jeanette Esser, George Henry & Elizabeth Emily Wheeler
- 8 Upper Marylebone Street became 152 New Cavendish Street – see Elizabeth Olwen & Ionwerth Lumley Jenkins
- 9 Upper Marylebone Street became 150 New Cavendish Street – see John Spenser & Annie Catherine Manning, and Frederick George Gransden.
Here are a couple of pictures I took in 2022 of the block of houses that was Upper Marylebone Street:
How could Horwood’s plan of 1792-1799 be in error? House numbering on Horwood’s plan is not 100% reliable and I believe this particular error is plain to see in the light of the other evidence I present:
Horwood leaves the three most easterly units on Upper Marylebone Street unnumbered, numbering the three most westerly units. Those three westerly units, together with an unnumbered unit from Ogle Court, subsequently became Highwood House.
It is clear from the renaming and renumbering in the 1930s that the three most easterly houses were numbered, 1, 2 & 3 Upper Marylebone Street. It is also more likely that unnumbered units were of lesser quality, more readily subsumed into a block of flats.
Barb Jacobson mentions evidence from tax records as well, which I have not seen, but it is quite possible that the three unnumbered units were part of the same demise as 9 Upper Marylebone Street – such detail would not be shown in tax records.
Still, I wanted more evidence from the Georgian period if I could find it. I turned to another great early trove of London street by street information: Lockie’s 1810 Topography of London.
Here is the relevant extract:
In other words, the small square behind No 10 Upper Marylebone Street could be found by passing three doors on the left after 9 Upper Marylebone Street. The three unnumbered doors were the three most westerly doors on the block, next to number 9.
I believe that all of this evidence is incontrovertible and points to the fact that the current house 154 New Cavendish Street is the house in which Thomas Paine wrote large chunks of Rights Of Man, as deliciously described in Barb Jacobson’s essay.
I meant to write all of this up in 2022, but life intervened and other matters prevailed.
Then, in late July 2025, I met with writer Benjamin Schwarz to discuss life, the universe and everything at Lord’s cricket ground, like you do, only to discover that his son had roomed on that very block while studying in London quite recently.
I told Ben the Thomas Paine story and he politely told me off for not having written it up. Actually, in truth, I told myself off while telling him the tale and he agreed with me that I deserved telling off and that the matter needed putting right.
As it happened, I found myself very near the scene with a bit of time on my hands on 30 July 2025.
Thomas Paine would surely have approved of his former writing digs now being a coffee shop. It was in such places that his writings were most often disseminated in the late 18th century.
I felt an overwhelming need to break the news about 154 New Cavendish Street to the current occupants. The gentleman depicted on this page extracted from the Cracked Coffee Company website greeted me warmly on learning the news and happily sold me a coffee and a cookie.
It was near to closing time and I was interrupting a deep conversation between that manager (who turned out to be Romanian) and a rather excitable Russian mathematician named Yuri. They both seemed fascinated by the Thomas Paine connection.
We all three tried to debate matters of great social, moral and geopolitical import in the 30 minutes before closing time. We thought it was what Thomas Paine would have wanted. We even made some progress, or at least came to the conclusion that some social progress has been made since Thomas Paine’s time there in the 1790s and since my family’s time there 100 years ago.
I’m rambling.
To summarise, I believe I have uncovered incontrovertible evidence that the site of Thomas ‘Clio’ Rickman’s house, 7 Upper Marylebone Street, where Thomas Paine stayed and wrote the second part of The Rights Of Man in the early 1790s, is now 154 New Cavendish Street, which is the original Georgian building in which those important events occurred.
I believe that 154 New Cavendish Street should be eligible for an English Heritage Blue Plaque based on the evidence I have presented in this paper. I urge the Thomas Paine Historical Association formally to request such a plaque for that building. If I can provide any further assistance in this matter, please let me know. I’d love to attend the unveiling of the Blue Plaque, if the timing permits.
Postscript: Hair Today & Gone Tomorrow In 7 Upper Marylebone Street
When conducting my 2022 research, my cousin Angela, whose memory can stretch back to the 1950s and 1960s, reminded me that the Gilbert family, who lived at 7 Upper Marylebone Street, were great friends of our family and remained friends for many decades after my family moved on.
Angela remembers visiting the Gilbert family (or, as my father would affectionately call them, “The Giblets”), at 154 New Cavendish Street and believes that at least some of the Gilbert family remained there into the late 1950s or even the 1960s. Theirs was a barbershop, so it is very likely indeed that my dad’s haircut in the picture above, and that of Michael, were from that very shop.
That dad haircut would have been about 100 years before I sat in the same shop, drinking coffee and trying to put the world to rights through lively discussion.
Parenthetically, I don’t think the Giblets would have enjoyed cutting my hair when I was a child – I was a resistor from an early age:
Thomas Paine might have had a thing or two to say about forcing a kid to have his hair cut against his will.
