Berkeley Square Gardens *

Site on The National Heritage List for England, Parks & Gardens, for Register Entry see https://www.historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list. The Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England was established in 1984 and was commonly called English Heritage. In April 2015 it split into 2 separate entities, Historic England (HE), which continues to champion and protect the historic environment, and the English Heritage Trust, whose role is to look after the 400+ historic sites and monuments owned by the state. HE manages the National Heritage List for England (NHLE) that includes over 400,000 items ranging from prehistoric monuments to office blocks, battlefields and parks, which benefit from legal protection.

Berkeley Square was first laid out in the mid C18th, the present design dating from the late 1760s. Lord Berkeley of Stratton, the Royalist commander in the Civil War, acquired extensive lands to the north of Piccadilly soon after the Restoration, and built his house on the site of the current Devonshire House. The family's country residence was Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. Development of the houses on the east side of Berkeley Square was completed in 1739 but the exact date for the enclosure is not known. In 1696 the 3rd Lord Berkeley of Stratton sold Berkeley House, Piccadilly, to the 1st Duke of Devonshire, who agreed to keep a strip of land the width of the garden clear of development in order to protect the view north from the house. This condition was honoured when the Berkeley estate was laid out for speculative building in the 1730s and 1740s, and resulted in the present square. The garden was first enclosed in the mid 1740s when the houses along the west side were completed. Over the subsequent two decades it fell into disrepair and by 1766, the enclosure was reported to have gone to ruin. The residents met at a coffee-house or tavern in Berkeley Square to approve a plan for fencing and laying out a garden. The Act (Geo. III. cap. 56) of 1766 enabled the trustees `to raise money to pave, light, clean and adorn the space' and a body of trustees formed to ensure its maintenance. The following year the ground was re-railed and laid out anew. The layout has remained virtually unchanged.

There are gates through the iron railings at the centre of each of the four sides of the long, rectangular site. The plot slopes gently down to the south although it has to some extent been levelled, resulting in a slight banking round the edge at the northern end. It is ringed by roads that separate it from the surrounding houses and office buildings. The main area is grassed, with a broad gravel walk forming an oval round the perimeter. Cross walks lead to the pump house, erected at the centre of the site in 1800. Four stone baskets have been placed round it.

A marble statue, the Woman of Samaria by Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Alexander Monro, 1881 stands at the southern end of the square. It was donated by the 3rd Marquis of Lansdowne, and replaced an equestrian statue of George II, cast in lead, which was removed in 1827.

Around the edge of the ground, and around the grass plots, stand a number of plane trees of a particularly upright form. They are thought to be those planted in the late 1780s by Edward Bouverie, the then resident of No.13. Westminster City Council, which maintains and manages the Square, undertook major works in 1994, with new hoggin and gravel paths, floodlighting, and the restoration (including turning her around to the original orientation) the of the Woman of Samaria.