45 Squared 1) VINCENT SQUARE, SW1
Borough of Westminster, 220m × 200m
Russell Square is smaller. Trafalgar Square is half the size. Lincoln's Inn Fields is marginally longer but less broad. Eaton Square is half an acre larger but Square only in name, being extremely oblong. And OK, Vincent Square may be a tad kite-shaped but it's also a proper Square with a perimeter of buildings facing out onto ten acres of grass so I'm claiming it as London's largest.
Vincent Square sits halfway between Victoria station and Tate Britain, but just far enough off Vauxhall Bridge Road that you might never know it was there. In the 18th century this area was TothillFields, a marshy area on the edge of Westminster used for horseracing, bearbaiting, seasonal fairs and other forms of communal recreation. Things only started to change in 1810 when the Dean of Westminster, William Vincent, asked a groundsman to surround a large square of grass with a ploughed furrow to mark it out as playing fields for Westminster School. Thus a private school acquired ten acres of common land no questions asked and still use it as a playing field to this day - they call it 'Fields'.
Picture a open space easily large enough for a full-sized cricket pitch, not that it's the season, with a half-timbered pavilion to one side and several nets on another. Elsewhere are tennis courts, a mini assault course and several football goals ready to be pushed into position, plus (yesterday at least) a groundsman dashing around readying everything for the first Day of Lent Term. Most other private schools in central London have to bus their pupils out to rugger practice but here they can walk down in their pink and blue hooped jerseys and get started on tackles and tactics far more quickly.
The joy for residents around the perimeter is that they thus face a well-tended greenspace with the nearest nosey neighbour over 200m distant. In the northeast corner a handful of the original 3-storey brick villas survive, specifically at numbers 3, 4 and 86. Later townhouses are one floor higher with stucco at ground floor and basement level and a continuous iron balcony running above. One of the residents within the smartest sweep is defeated Tory leadership candidate Robert Jenrick, who splashed out £2.5m buying a property in 2013 because it's always useful to have a second home within a short walk of the Commons. He finally managed to get his roof extension past Westminster's planning officers at the third attempt in 2020 but rest assured you can't see it from the street.
The chief political presence on the square is actually Liberal Democrat HQ at number 1, a morose office block thankfully set back in one corner where it's minimally prominent. They moved here in 2021 and it says something for the current state of the party that they only occupy the top floor, just up the stairs from Pringle knitwear. The Embassy of the Republic of North Macedonia doesn't have a great street presence either, although their sunburst flag brings a welcome splash of colour to the square's southwest corner.
The most impressive buildings are on the northern side, anchored by the HQ of the Royal Horticultural Society who moved here in 1904, as the Roman numerals above the door confirm. The Arts and Crafts frontage conceals their green-fingered library and offices, and immediately behind is the barrel-shaped Lawrence Hall, originally proposed by Edward VII so the RHS could have somewhere purpose-built to hold their shows. A second more spectacular hall followed one street back in the 1920s, but this has since been sold off to Westminster School to use as a sports centre because the gym, badminton courts, fencing pistes and climbing walls have to go somewhere.
Vincent Square has far more than its fair share of institutional buildings. Nextdoor with the ripply brickwork is Westminster Kingsway College, which started out as a School of Hospitality in 1910 because Auguste Escoffier and César Ritz needed somewhere to train top quality chefs. It's since broadened its vocational offering and is now just one cog in the capital's largest further education portfolio, but you can still book a table at The Vincent Rooms if you fancy sampling the very best in up-and-coming student cuisine. Even Jamie Oliver had to start somewhere, and he started here.
Medical professionals also moved in en masse, and then moved out. Westminster Children's Hospital is now flats. The Nurses' Home has been merged with the Theological Hostel and is now a 160 bed hotel. The Doctor's surgery at number 11 is now the home of the aforementioned Shadow Secretary of State for Justice. And the Grosvenor Hospital, once the gynaecological wing of St Thomas's, reopened in 1981 as Westminster Under School and is now packed with bubbly long-socked prep-schoolers. They too share the ten acre sports field, aided on their way by a lollipop lady who sees their crocodile across an impressively unbusy street. In a different world that playing field could have accommodated hundreds of council homes, but it'll never happen because this is Vincent Square SW1 and a headmaster got here first.
