The churchwardens of St. John's possess an interesting memento in the form of a snuff-box, presented in 1801 by "Thomas Gayfere, Esq., Father of the Vestry of St. John the Evangelist." This has been handed down to the succeeding office-bearers, who have enriched and enlarged it by successive silver plates and cases.
Smith Square shows, like so much of Westminster, an odd mixture of old brick houses, with heavily-tiled roofs, and new brick flats of great height. In the south-west corner stands the Rectory. Romney and Marsham Streets were called after Charles Marsham, Earl of Romney. Tufton Street was named after Sir Richard Tufton. One of the cockpits in Westminster was here as late as 1815, long after the more fashionable one in St. James's Park had vanished. The northern part of the street between Great Peter and Great College Streets was formerly known as Bowling Alley. Here the notorious Colonel Blood lived.
Near the corner of Little Smith Street stands an architectural museum; it is not a very large building, but the frontage is rendered interesting by several statues and reliefs in stone. This, to give it its full title, is "The Royal Architectural Museum and School of Art in connection with the Science and Art Department." The gallery is open free from ten to four daily, and in the rooms opening off its corridors art classes for students of both sexes are held; the walls are absolutely covered with ancient fragments of architecture and sculpture. The row of houses opposite to the museum is doomed to demolition, a process which has begun already at the north end. The house third from the south end, a small grocer's shop, is the one in which the great composer and musician Purcell lived. He was born in Great St. Ann's Lane near the Almonry, and his mother, as a widow, lived in Tothill Street. The boy at the very early age of six was admitted to the choir of the Chapel Royal, and was appointed organist to Westminster Abbey when only two-and-twenty, a place he very nearly lost by refusing to give up to the Dean and Chapter the proceeds of letting the seats in the organ-loft to view the coronation of James II., a windfall he considered as a perquisite. He is buried beneath the great organ, which had so often throbbed out his emotions in the sounds in which he had clothed them. On leaving Tufton Street he went to Marsham Street, where he died in 1695. The art students from the gallery now patronize the little room behind the shop for lunch and tea, running across in paint-covered pinafore or blouse, making the scene veritably Bohemian.