The Mercers’ estate between Shelton Street and Long Acre has belonged to the company since 1530. It is a field of ten acres, the remnant of a larger bequest to the Company comprising some 149 acres of pasture and arable in what were then the rural Middlesex parishes of St. Martins-in-the-Fields and St. Margaret’s Westminster and Marylebone, from ‘Lady’ Bradbury, the pious and wealthy widow of Thomas Bradbury (citizen, mercer and Lord Mayor). In return for this bequest, which also included Lady Bradbury’s mansion house in the City, the Mercers Company was entrusted with the provision of free coals for the poor of St. Stephen’s along with the maintenance of a chantry priest to make perpetual prayers for the souls of herself and her husband Thomas as well as her first husband, Thomas Bodley, citizen and Merchant-Taylor.

In 1542 Henry VIII forced the company to relinquish the ownership of most of this estate leaving them with only the field of ten acres, known as the Elm Field, situated between Drury Lane on the east and St. Martin’s Lane on the west just to the north of the Earl of Bedford’s Covent Garden estate. The boundary between the two properties was a foot-path known as the Long Acre.

The Company, during its first two hundred years of ownership of Long Acre, enjoyed very little direct benefit from what remained of Lady Bradbury’s ‘greate graunte’ as it was all let on long lease to prominent courtiers. Thus, in 1578 Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley, principal minister to Elizabeth I, who was then enlarging his residence in the Strand, requested and obtained from the company a 21 year lease of the entire site. This lease was renewed for a further term in 1598 and was demised to Burghley’s son, Thomas, Earl of Exeter, in 1614 for another 30 years. Under the Earl of Exeter’s tenure Long Acre began to be developed for building on a piecemeal basis by the Earl’s assignee, Sir William Slingsby (whose name is commemorated in Slingsby Place).

The pattern was set for the development of the area under the auspices of a series of aristocratic tenants who held the whole of the Mercers’ estate on a long lease, to begin in 1644 for 77 years (to 1721). This passed in 1653 to Henry, Earl of Monmouth, (whose nearby residence is commemorated in present day Monmouth Street in Seven Dials). After Monmouth the leasehold interest passed in 1662 to the Earl of Clarendon whose lease was extended for a further 39 years from 1721 to 1760.

The estate developed rapidly at this time as a result of the seventeenth century speculative building boom. The Earl of Bedford’s great venture to the south in Covent Garden, elegantly laid out as a continental ‘piazza’ by Inigo Jones, set the pattern for the whole of the West End. Beginning in 1614 the Long Acre was rapidly transformed from pasture and meadow into a cosmopolitan thoroughfare, with mansion houses ‘fit for the habitations of Gentlemen & men of ability’.

As the value of the land grew with the construction of new mansion houses, gardens and tenements the Company increasingly came to regret that it did not control the site directly. By 1650 the estate contained some 300 houses and other buildings producing 123 annual rental income which went, of course, to the leaseholder rather than to the Company. The Clerk to the Company in the late seventeenth century, John Godfrey, wrote of the need to rectify the arrangement by which ‘…the best jewel in their estate’ was allowed to become ‘a morsel fitted for the mouth of some powerful and greedy courtier…’

Something of the Company’s frustration over its lack of control of the site may be gauged from a complaint to the Earl of Clarendon about his failure to maintain the Company’s maiden head crest as property marks on buildings in Long Acre.

This situation was only resolved after the Company’s near financial collapse in 1747 which was occasioned by involvement in a disastrous scheme for providing annuities to the widows of clergymen. Unable to meet its commitments under this scheme (to which estates such as Long Acre had been settled as security) the Company was forced to procure the help of Parliament, two Acts of which, dated 21 and 24 George II, allowed the company to grant leases of estates which had been settled under the failed annuity scheme. Under these two Acts the Company was authorised to grant building leases on 61 year terms and repairing leases on 41 year terms, which were scheduled to coincide with the end of the Earl of Clarendon’s lease of the whole estate in 1760.

In the run up to the expiration of Clarendon’s term in 1760, the Company made preparations for taking over direct management of Long Acre. In 1755 the Company’s surveyor, William Robinson, was directed to draw up a comprehensive survey of the estate. His detailed plan and written description provide a vivid record of the multiplicity of uses to which the estate was put in the mid-eighteenth century.

Long Acre was already dominated by the coach building industry; Pepys had bought a coach there in the seventeenth century. Robinson’s plan shows the larger workshops of master coach builders intermingled with smaller workshops for ancillary crafts such as harness makers, joiners and wheelwrights. There was a high proportion of small specialist retail shops selling items such as toys, books, musical instruments, ‘perruques’ or wigs. A shopkeeper in Cross Lane, later renamed Neal Street, was specified by Robinson as a  ‘gingerbreadman’. The presence of two large breweries, a Quaker burial ground, a non-conformist meeting house, and an infamous ‘bagnio’ (or bath house) testifies to the variety and vitality of life in the area at that date.

As Robinson’s plan shows, the narrow alleys which ran off Long Acre and which correspond to the modern streets had different names from today. Neal Street was known as Cross Lane; Shelton Street was originally Castle Street (after the line of earthwork defences built around London during the civil war). Arne Street, though originally christened Charles Street, was popularly known as Dirty Lane and was shown as such by Robinson. As the name implies parts of the estate away from the main street were less than salubrious. A contemporary description of the various streets said of Mercer Street that it was `of no great account for building or inhabitants, who are a great part FRENCH.’ Voltaire spent his years of exile in lodgings above the sign of ‘The White Peruke’. Though still residential in character, Long Acre was no longer the fashionable suburb its original developers had intended in the seventeenth century.

By the early nineteenth century the area between Shelton Street and Long Acre was largely commercial with the expanding Woodyard Brewery gradually pushing out the smaller workshops, though coachbuilders continued to occupy most of the premises in Long Acre itself. Early nineteenth century directories list 30 coachbuilders’ premises.