Setted Street Surface

Setted Street Surface

Charterhouse Square and Rutland Place

The setted road structure comprises courses of granite setts dating from the 1860s with York flagstone pavements and granite kerbstones from the early 19th century. A later concrete apron around the garden is not of special interest.

Charterhouse Square is an irregular pentagon-shaped open space with a central garden and roads on all five sides. All roads except Carthusian Street (which runs west-east along the south of the square) are laid with the setted road structure, which also extends down Rutland Place, down part of Charterhouse Lane, and into the carriage arches of the Charterhouse gatehouse and Florin Court. The garden is bounded by cast iron railings with three pairs of cast-iron gates leading into the square—two from Carthusian Street on the south side and one from Charterhouse Lane to the north-west. This ironwork, along with four lamp posts and bollards outside the Charterhouse lodge, is listed at Grade II, as are many of the buildings around the square.

The setted road structure comprises pavements on both sides of the roads around the garden and outside the buildings, with rectangular granite kerbstones and courses of granite setts on the roads themselves. The pavements are paved with large York flagstones, except along the stretch outside the buildings on Charterhouse Street where asphalt has replaced the flags. These pavements probably date from the early 19th century, though those around the garden have been narrowed where concrete parking bays were laid. The setts are in a variety of sizes, colours, and granite types laid in courses—some of large setts, others smaller, some closely laid, others wide. They are mainly blue or grey, though some are rose-coloured Mount Sorrel granite from Leicestershire. The coursing runs across the road surface, changing direction abruptly at the corners. Bands of narrower, closely-set setts run across the two northern corners of the square; these would have been swept and kept cleaner than the larger setts of the road surface and served as road crossings. The granite setts show much wear and are pleasingly irregular in surface finish, contrasting in character with the more regular setts of other Victorian streets and possibly reflecting the reuse of earlier material. Small areas of end-set paving, possibly of Purbeck stone, survive in front of the western pair of gate piers on Carthusian Street.

Two major alterations have been made to the setts: the creation of concrete parking bays around the garden, necessitating removal of original setts, and the insertion of three speed bumps on the north side of the square. Various repairs have taken place over the years with varying degrees of sensitivity to the original fabric, though few have used cement mortar as is commonly found in repaired street surfaces.

Charterhouse Square lies to the south of the monastic foundation from which it takes its name—a 14th-century Carthusian priory rebuilt in the 16th century as almshouses and a school, now one of the most important surviving buildings of late medieval London. The square itself was laid out in the late 17th century and by the Georgian period was a smart address, its central garden criss-crossed with two avenues of trees planted in 1727 and overlooked by terraced houses. Iron railings were installed in 1792, but at that point the roads around the square were laid with broad cobbles covered with gravel and dirt, with no pavements. An early photograph by Valentine Blanchard, taken around 1860, shows a pavement around the inner side of the square but the road surface is difficult to determine. By the time Yorke & Sons photographed the square around 1870, the road had been paved with the granite setts that survive today. The setted road structure thus largely dates from the 1860s, with a pavement from a few decades earlier, reflecting the major period of resurfacing of London streets in the mid-19th century.

Before the mid-Victorian period, street coverings, where they existed at all, were usually round boulders or large irregular pebbles, which provided some surface stability but little comfort for carriage passengers due to wide joints collecting filth. In 1824 the engineer Thomas Telford recommended in his Report respecting the Street Pavements of the Parish of St George's, Hanover Square that roads be laid with a foundation of broken stones or concrete upon which rectangular paving stones of granite, worked flat on the face and straight and square on the sides to joint closely, should be placed and grouted with lime and sand. Telford suggested different sized stones for different classes of streets, ranging from 4 to 7 inches wide and 7 to 13 inches long. The development of railways facilitated the transportation of granite, and by mid-century great numbers of London streets were being repaved with stone from Aberdeen, the Channel Islands, and the West Country. The Metropolitan Board of Works used Telford's system in many streets laid out in the 1860s, followed by parish vestries responsible for road maintenance. Under the Metropolis Management Act of 1855, responsibility for paving the footpaths and carriageways in Charterhouse Square passed to Holborn District Board of Works, from a trust established by the local Paving Act of 1742. The Board of Works likely instigated the repaving in the 1860s, done to a modified version of Telford's specifications. It was common practice to reuse older setts when constructing road surfaces, with worn setts from busy roads often relaid on quieter thoroughfares; this appears to have happened at Charterhouse Square, where the setts differ in surface finish.

This setted road structure is designated for being an extremely rare survival of a mid-Victorian road surface in a London square, for the design interest of the different types, colours, and sizes of the setts and the irregularity of surface finishes, for the quality of workmanship required to create an even surface from setts of different size particularly where the courses change direction at the corners and along the two pathways, for the early 19th-century York stone flags and granite kerbstones of the pavements which are more typical but an integral part of the structure, and for its group value as part of a strong ensemble including Victorian street furniture and listed buildings ranging from the entrance to the Charterhouse and the earliest terraced house in the square of around 1700 (at Nos. 4-5, behind later facades) to a 1930s Moderne block of flats at Florin Court.