Belgravia Living
Thomas Cubitt (1788 – 1856)
Thomas Cubitt was possibly the most important and the most successful of the Victorian builder-developers in London. He built much of Bloomsbury, Belgravia, Pimlico, Clapham Common, Islington and Kemp Town at Brighton. (Also in Dorking where they have erected a statue of him).
He was born in 1788 in in the village of Buxton in Norfolk. His father was also in the building trade and moved to London with his young family in the last year of the 18th century. Thomas trained as a carpenter. On his father's death in 1806, he signed on as a captain's joiner on a ship to India. He used the small savings he amassed to set himself up as a carpenter in London. His brother William was a carpenter as well and the two of them took premises in Holborn, where they got a job re-roofing the Russell Institution. From carpenter he rose rapidly to become builder and finally master contractor.
Cubitt soon discovered that clients often insisted on a penalty clause to cover late completion. This drove many speculators to bankruptcy, not because of their own failings but because they relied heavily on sub –contractors, who disappeared at the crucial moment to do other jobs. So from the start Cubitt employed his own team of tradesmen on a full-time basis to cover all the necessary building skills. In the early 19th century, most buildings were constructed by different craftsmen working separately. As much as anything else this policy contributed to his success.
He took large premises on the east side of Gray’s Inn Road as a building year and he even developed his own brickfields and set up a civil engineering department to handle the building of roads, sewers and pavements. He was clearly a good employer. His men were well treated. He paid fair wages. (This was a time when many builders paid their men in tokens which could only be used at a local pub, where he had an arrangement with the publican to overcharge the employees and split the profit.) He also allowed 'tea breaks'. He built a school for his workmen's children and even built them a library. This all cost him, but as a result he had good quality foremen and hard working men.
He and his brother amicably parted ways early on. William was more cautious and tended to take on the construction of individual buildings. His legacy includes the Covent Garden Market, now full of shops. Thomas took to large scale speculation as a developer. With the support of bankers he built terraces in Stoke Newington and Walworth. His brother Lewis designed many of the buildings that Thomas's firm constructed.
His premises in Gray’s Inn Road were inside the Duke of Bedford’s estate, and he got some commissions from him. After some small-scale building of one or two houses at a time Cubitt entered into a contract to put up well over 150 houses in Bloomsbury, in the vicinity of Gordon and Tavistock Squares. Many of his houses were eventually taken by the University of London
Cubitt was still only 37 when on 18th March 1825 he signed his first building agreement with Robert, 2nd Earl Grosvenor to begin construction of Belgravia. Cubitt had already performed some work for the Grosvenors in Berkeley Square. But it was still a huge gamble for both of them.
The broad outline of the ‘Five Fields’ scheme had been drafted. The fact that Cubitt had his own team of workmen and support facilities was in his favour. He was prepared to sign up for house building on a grand scale, and to provide sewers, road surfaces, and pavements. He was far-sighted enough – or reckless enough - to undertake the parallel development of the ‘Neathouse’ region, which was to become Pimlico (and was nick-named “Mr. Cubitt’s District”). Here he not only built the houses, he also built the Embankment itself and the infrastructure of sewers and roads.
Belgravia seems an obvious sure thing today. But in the 1830s it was no more than a wasteland avoided by decent folk. It was the building of Buckingham Palace, then literally on the fringes of respectable London which attracted potential buyers. Even so, it was considered so uncertain at the time whether the aristocracy would move there that when the Earl of Essex was enticed to take one of the first houses in Belgrave Square, he was nicknamed ‘the Decoy Duck’. It proved successful but it was not all plain sailing. There was a collapse in the property in the mid 1830s which Cubitt only survived by taking contract jobs from the Duke of Bedford on the Bloomsbury Estate.
Although Cubitt is generally regarded now as the builder of Belgravia, in fact his business only built 250 – 300 of the houses. Many of the terraces were assigned to smaller builders. Much of Eccleston Square and Ebury Street was built by George Watkins. W H Seth Smith built Wilton Crescent and Wilton Place. And Joseph Cundy, bother of Thomas Cundy the Grosvenors’ estate surveyor, also built in Belgravia before eventually going bankrupt.
Cubitt was one of the favourite builders of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The prince invited Cubitt to build the new east front of their new royal residence, Buckingham Palace. Cubitt also built ‘Osborne’, Queen Victoria’s retreat on the Isle of Wight.
In the 1850s he bought the estate of Denbies in Surrey and began building himself a house there. He died there in 1856 at the age of 68. He chose to be buried at Norwood.
This is what Queen Victoria wrote about him after his death: "In his sphere of life, with the immense business he had in hand, he is a real national loss. A better, kind-hearted or more simple, unassuming man never breathed." Thomas Cubitt was one of the few Victorian speculators to ride out all storms and die a rich man. He left more than £1,000,000 when he died – a huge sum in Victorian terms.
His son George inherited his fortune and in 1892 became the first Lord Ashcombe. Thomas Cubitt's house at Denbies has not survived but his son George built St Barnabas Church close to Denbies on the North Downs Way.
Thomas's brothers were also successful. His brother Lewis was the architect of King’s Cross station (not the present awful one) and his brother William built Cubitt Town in the Isle of Dogs as well as Covent Garden market.
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