The year that Bond Street was nearly renamed Bond Street

It’s 1923, and central London’s famously posh shopping street, Bond Street, is about to be renamed… Bond Street.

If that sounds odd, that’s because there isn’t a Bond Street in central London – there’s New Bond Street and Old Bond Street, which most people assume is all one road called Bond Street. Even those who know there are two tend to use the singular Bond Street to describe them both, as it’s convenient to do so.

For the record, the southern section is Old Bond Street, and the longer northern section is New Bond Street.

As to how they got their names, well, it seems an odd decision in the first place.

Old Bond Street was laid out in the 1680s-90s when Sir Thomas Bond bought a large mansion house facing onto Piccadilly and redeveloped the house and its large back garden into a block of streets lined with houses.

One of those was Bond Street.

New Bond Street was added just 14 years later, and it would seem odd that after such a short gap in development that they would want to give the single length of road two different names.

In fact, John Strype’s map from 1707 shows New Bond Street being laid out as “Bond Street continued”, so they might have almost kept the singular Bond Street for the whole road. With the caveat that maps were rather less reliable in those days, Henry Overton’s map of 1720 also shows the whole road as Bond Street.

However, around this time, someone somewhere decided to give them two separate names, which required plain Bond Street to be renamed Old Bond Street.

The earliest reference I can find to either New or Old Bond Street as opposed to plain Bond Street is from December 1720. Maybe it’s just an absence of news and reports, but the earliest reports of Old Bond Street are several years later, so either both were renamed simultaneously, but there’s no news about Old Bond Street, or it was renamed a few years later.

So the two roads were named Old and New, and didn’t seem to be a problem for another 200 years.

However, in May 1923 the fading use of New and Old in common parlance led Westminster Council to consider scrapping them entirely and renaming the whole thing as plain Bond Street.

Westminster Council’s works committee was considering a letter from a company in New Bond Street complaining that the separate naming was confusing to locals and foreigners, and the letter said, especially to Americans. The letter said the separate names should be abolished.

The Committee was minded to agree, and on 24th May 1923, when the council met to discuss the proposals, they decided it was a good idea.

However, they were about to come up against a formidable foe — the residents — and nothing is more terrifying to a council than a lot of rich people with plenty of time on their hands.

Seventy ratepayers on Old Bond Street protested against the name change, mustering a vote on both New and Old streets to come up with 152 against to 66 in favour.

The Old Bond Streeters were particularly incensed at the thought that, as Old Bond Street was considered to be even more upmarket than New Bond Street, the merger of the two would reduce the value of their homes.

In the end, in July 1923, the council bowed to the ratepayers’ wishes, reversed its earlier decision, and didn’t rename the street.

And apparently, it’s been confusing Americans ever since.

Of course, it doesn’t confuse the average, or in Bond Street(s) case, more than average shopper, and the fact that Bond Street is actually made up of two separate streets is the sort of thing that rarely troubles anyone other than delivery drivers and pub quizzes.