50 Berkeley Square

Berkeley Square was laid out in the mid-eighteenth century and its townhouses were built for the fashionable and the well-connected. Number 50 was the London home of George Canning, who was Prime Minister briefly in 1827; the Greater London Council put up his blue plaque on the house in 1979. Nothing in Canning's time suggests anything strange about the building.

The house's reputation begins with a later tenant, Thomas Myers, who occupied it from 1859 until his death in November 1874. Myers is said to have been jilted by his fiancée and to have retreated into the house, sleeping by day, wandering the rooms by night and letting the building decay around him. To the neighbours, a dark, neglected house in a smart square with a recluse inside it looked exactly like a haunted house, and by the time Myers died the stories were already circulating. In 1879, an article in Mayfair magazine claimed that a maid who had been put to sleep in the attic room had been found raving and had died in an asylum the next day.

The stories gathered momentum through the late nineteenth century and were collected by the writers of the Edwardian ghost boom. Charles G. Harper illustrated the house in Haunted Houses in 1907, and Jessie Adelaide Middleton devoted a chapter to it in The Grey Ghost Book in 1912, for which she interviewed the then tenant, the Countess of Selkirk. Maggs Bros bought the building in the late 1930s and traded there until 2015, moving to Curzon Street the following year. The house has stood empty since February 2020.

Almost everything reported at 50 Berkeley Square comes from the nineteenth century, and much of it from print rather than from named witnesses. The 1879 Mayfair magazine piece about the maid is the earliest published account, and the Lyttelton night of 1872 is the earliest with a named participant. Victorian newspapers and society magazines repeated and improved on the stories, and by the 1880s the house was routinely described as the most haunted in London.

The sceptical case was made early and has never really been answered. When Jessie Adelaide Middleton researched The Grey Ghost Book in 1912 she interviewed the Countess of Selkirk, who was living in the house, and found no trace of anything unusual. "So the mystery of Berkeley Square resolves itself into nothingness," she wrote at the end of her chapter. Maggs Bros, who occupied the building from the late 1930s until 2015, reported no phenomena in nearly eighty years, though staff cheerfully kept the legend alive, and the firm still publishes a light-hearted piece about the basement on its website. Modern investigators generally conclude that the reputation grew out of Thomas Myers's eccentric, shuttered years and was then embroidered by writers who never set foot inside.

That has not stopped the London Dungeon from building a show around it. The Nameless Thing has proved more durable than any named ghost, precisely because nobody can say what it is.

50 Berkeley Square is private property and has never been open to the public, so a visit means standing on the pavement. It is easy to find: the west side of Berkeley Square in Mayfair, London W1J, a few minutes' walk from Green Park and Bond Street tube stations. From the square you can see the plain brick front, the tall sash windows and the blue plaque to George Canning, and you can look up at the attic window and decide for yourself. The building has stood empty since February 2020, and a private members' club group has put forward proposals to refurbish numbers 49 and 50 as a wellness and spa destination, so its appearance may change.

The square itself, with its enormous plane trees, is a pleasant place to sit, and the surrounding streets are full of galleries, pubs and restaurants. The London Dungeon on the South Bank has a 50 Berkeley Square attraction if you want the story with special effects. For a bed, Mayfair has some of London's grandest hotels, and there is a wider choice within a short walk around Piccadilly, Soho and Marylebone.