Chester Square is in Belgravia, the southwestern part of Central London and is part of the Grosvenor Estate, a large area of houses built for the very well-to-do on land owned by the immensely wealthy Dukes of Westminster. Designed and built by Thomas Cubitt, construction of Chester Square started in 1835 and the whole square was completed by the mid-nineteenth century. Like much of the Grosvenor Estate, the square is made up of tall white stucco terraced houses, rather plainly decorated. The family’s London house had much in common with their first home on the Hove seafront, another four-story Georgian-style house with an area basement and a first-floor balcony. There is a private garden in the middle of the square with substantial old plane trees and a rose garden for residents to enjoy.
The de la Pastures used 62 Chester Square as their London home at least from 1905, when Henry de la Pasture appears in the London Post Office Directory. They had rented other London houses before, but Betty’s literary success may have made this address more affordable. In 1905 and 1906 her play Peter’s Mother had two successful West End productions, so a London base would have been more important than ever, and she would also have wanted a London home to launch her two daughters into society as they reached their late teens.
Violet Powell credits EMD with “glowing recollections” of 62 Chester Square, based on the poem dedicating The Heel of Achilles (1921) to her sister Yoé, but I read this more as a celebration of their relationship in general, rather than the house. Her 1932 novel Thank Heaven Fasting moves the action to the neighbouring Eaton Square, but surely draws on her experience of being a young woman launched on London society. Her heroine’s house is luxurious and comfortable, but confining and constraining. Perhaps EMD recognised the luxury and beauty of her surroundings but also their limitations. A more benign portrait of a similar house can be found in Betty’s The Lonely Lady of Grosvenor Square (1907) although she also brings in the stifling social standards of the area, to comic effect in her novel.
The de la Pastures continued to rent 62 Chester Square after Henry’s death in 1908, and Betty was married from this house to Hugh Clifford in 1910, after which presumably she gave it up. It certainly had another tenant, MP Sir Wilfrid Lawson, by 1915.
Chester Square is still an incredibly elite address with some immensely expensive houses and a number of well-known residents. There are blue plaques to Matthew Arnold and Mary Shelley, who predated the de la Pastures, and Yehudi Menuhin who came later.
Photograph of Chester Square copyright Paul Smart, used under Creative Commons 2.0 licence.