The actress Lillie Langtry (1852–1929) lived from 1892 to 1897 at 21 Pont Street, marked with a blue plaque in 1980. The building became part of the Cadogan Hotel in 1895, but she still stayed in her old bedroom even after this. Oscar Wilde was arrested in room number 118 of the Cadogan Hotel on 6 April 1895.
Politician Harry Crookshank (1893–1961) lived from 1937 until his death at 51 Pont Street.[1]
Portmeirion was an antiques shop in Pont Street, established by Sam Beazley and Adrienne Barker. It was named after the village of that name in north Wales because of Beazley's family connection to the village. The shop later became the headquarters of Portmeirion Pottery. A section of railing from the Liverpool Sailors' Home was installed outside the shop by Clough Williams-Ellis.
"Pont Street Dutch", a term coined by Osbert Lancaster, is the architectural style typified by the large red brick gabled houses built in the 1880s in Pont Street.[2]Nikolaus Pevsner writes of the style as "tall, sparingly decorated red brick mansions for very wealthy occupants, in the semi-Dutch, semi-Queen-Anne style of Shaw or George & Peto".[3]
In John Betjeman's poem, "The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel" (1937), the second stanza describes Wilde in 1895 gazing out of his hotel window:
To the right and before him Pont Street
Did tower in her new built red,
As hard as the morning gaslight
That shone on his unmade bed.
In Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited (1945), "Pont Street" is a shorthand term for a particular upper class subculture. The character Julia and her friends say that "it was 'Pont Street' to wear a signet ring and to give chocolates at the theatre; it was 'Pont Street' at a dance to say, 'Can I forage for you?'".
In Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate (1949), the heroine's aunt, who is bringing her up to mix in the best society, is said to "keep her nose firmly to Pont Street".
References
^Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Volume 14. Oxford University Press. 2004. p. 402.Article by S. J. Ball.