Queen's Gate Living
Alexander or Thurloe Estate
The other main bit of land making up the Queen’s Gate area was part of the Alexander or Thurloe Estate. Their holding was the southern part of the Queen’s Gate area (bordering Cromwell Road). The estate also included the present Alexander Square and Thurloe Square.
This estate also originated with Sir William Blake. This was land which his son, William, retained when the rest was sold off to Methwold. It passed to his son, Christopher, who left it to his sister, Mary Dorney and the children of her first marriage. Eventually it was inherited in the early 1700s by her grand-daughter Anna Maria Harris. In 1713 she married John Thurloe Brace. Their son, Harris Thurloe Brace, a Dragoon Guard officer, inherited the land. When he died in 1799 he left it to his godson, John Alexander, a lawyer in Bedford Row. John Alexander planned Alexander Square but died in 1831 before work could commence. He in turn left the estate to his son, Henry Browne Alexander, who was also a lawyer. H B Alexander was responsible for most of the development of the estate during his long ownership which lasted till his death in 1885.
The estate passed to his son, also a lawyer, named William Henry Alexander, whose claim to fame is that he paid for the construction of the National Portrait Gallery off Trafalgar Square.
The Alexander estate is more familiar as ‘the Thurloe Estate’. The myth put about in the 19th century was that the estate had originally been given by Oliver Cromwell to John Thurloe, who was a prominent Puritan politician of the Civil War period. In fact, as above, the only ‘Thurloe’ connection was that the famous Puritan’s grandson married Anna Maria Harris in 1713.
