This amazing (and the day I was visiting, tragically backlit and sunstruck) building at 109 Marylebone High Street features stunning Victorian facade decorated with several bands of chimeric figures, both human and animal.
Blasterz are no experts, but this area of the street looks like it dates from the late 19th century to us. We have not been able to finds out any information on the actual date of the building, (Our old trick of searching property appraisal records doesn't work in the UK, where you have to be registered and pay a fee.) Several nearby buildings date from the 1860s to the 1910s. We think the waymarked building dates from not later than 1890s.
The former home of the Black Horse Pub which closed in 2009 (note the horse relief on the pediment), the building today houses The Providores Tapas restaurant. See: (
visit link)
"By London standards, a little discovery.
We nearly missed it. Marylebone High Street, like most streets in London, is one long line of buildings with no break between them, a terrace of six-story buildings the entire length of the block. Each had its own architecture and color, but you have to pay attention to differentiate. The Black Horse is a particularly attractive brownstone building with arched windows and elaborate detail.
We went in with a plan in mind. Half a pint in a pub meant that we could visit many, many pubs in a day, so we ordered halves. Mid-way through the first half, I knew we were staying for more. Nothing but locals in at the bar, young lads serving who knew the punters by their first names, old guys and young guys mixing well. Good beer (Timothy Taylors Landlord), high ceilings, old fixtures, traditional pub velvet-covered bench seating, but most of all a very relaxed, friendly, accepting atmosphere that virtually insisted we stay.
I even chatted with an old gentleman at the bar. He had been coming here for 62 years, and would not go anywhere else. They even help him across the High Street when he is ready to go home. In the middle of one of the largest cities in the world, here was a local pub.
Marylebone is an interesting little neighborhood and one that we have had the opportunity to explore a little, usually on our way to and from feeding the ducks in Regents Park.
The name Marylebone dates back to the Fourteenth Century when the area was a very rough area that was out of bounds to most decent Londoners. The local church at Tyburn was continuously being attacked and the desperate parishioners successfully petitioned the Bishop of London to build them a new church half a mile away. This new church was called St. Mary's-by-the-Bourne (the River Tyburn was originally called the River Tybourne), which became shortened to Marylebone. A bourne is an old word for a stream that only runs in winter.
The district's most infamous historical feature for many years was the notorious gallows, nicknamed 'The Tyburn Tree'. From its first use in 1388, the majority of London's public executions were held here. It was an elaborate three-legged affair that could quite efficiently dispatch twenty-one felons at a time. The approximate site of the gallows is marked by a plaque on the traffic island at the junction of Bayswater and Edgeware roads.
Most of the people executed had been held in Newgate Prison and during the four hundred years that the gallows stood, it is said that fifty thousand people died there. Such was its reputation and aura of death, that people refused to move into the area, and for a long time no real development took place here. Finally the gallows were dismantled in 1780, and the neighborhood started to improve and expand.
Marylebone High Street itself is a little unusual in that is not at all straight. This is because the High Street and Marylebone Lane, which linked the original village to London, was developed alongside the winding River Tyburn, now completely covered over.
The High Street actually offers a rather pleasant pub-crawl as recommended by John Rogers:
Traveling sequentially to the Rising Sun (79 Marylebone High Street);
Marylebone Tup (93 Marylebone High Street);
Bricklayers Arms (33 Aybrook Street);
Black Horse (109 Marylebone High Street);
Prince Alfred (118 Marylebone Lane);
Golden Eagle (59 Marylebone Lane).
This would indeed offer a patron a splendid evening of entertainment."