20 Frith Street

20 Frith Street is a building in the Soho district of London. It is located on the east side of Frith Street, close to the junction with Old Compton Street. The building which currently occupies the site of 20 Frith Street was built in 1858 by William Coorze to replace a house which dated from c1725, which itself may have replaced an even earlier building.

When the house was built in around 1725 there were fewer houses in the street (which for a period was named Thrift Street), because the north end was taken up by Monmouth House. At the time, the grounds of Monmouth House (now demolished) extended from the south side of Soho Square to Queen Street (now Bateman Street); and so during some of the eighteenth century the house's address was 15 Thrift Street. The most famous inhabitant at this address was Wolfgang Mozart, who lived there aged eight from September 1764 during his grand tour of Europe with his father and his sister.

The site gained its current address of No. 20 Frith Street some time after 1773 when Monmouth House was pulled down, and more houses began to be built on its former grounds at the north end of the street. The eighteenth-century building at No. 20 was demolished and rebuilt in 1858, and since 1930 it has served as the stage door entrance for the Prince Edward Theatre situated on Old Compton Street. A blue plaque commemorates Mozart's stay.

Frith Street

Frith Street is in the Soho area of London. To the north is Soho Square and to the south is Shaftesbury Avenue. The street crosses Old Compton Street, Bateman Street and Romilly Street.

History

Frith Street was built in the years around 1680, and was apparently named after a wealthy builder named Richard Frith. In the 18th and early 19th centuries many artistic and literary people came to live in Soho and several of them settled in this street. The painter John Alexander Gresse was here in 1784, the year of his death. John Horne Tooke, philologist and politician, lived here in about 1804; John Constable lived here 1810–11; John Bell, the sculptor, in 1832–33 and William Hazlitt wrote his last essays while he was lodging at No. 6 Frith Street prior to his death there in 1830. The lithographic artist Alfred Concanen had a studio at No. 12 for many years.

Samuel Romilly, the legal reformer, was born at No. 18 in 1757, and the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lodged at No. 20 with his father and sister in 1764–65. In 1816 the actor William Charles Macready was living at No. 64, and over a hundred years later, from 1924 to 1926 John Logie Baird lived at No. 22 where on 26 January 1926 he demonstrated television to members of the Royal Institution.