In 1895, a book edited by L.B. Seeley was published on Fanny Burney and her Friends. It is interesting to read the description of St. Martin’s Street at that time.

“Very seldom, in these latter days, does any private carriage, with or without a coronet on its panels, turn into the decayed thoroughfare running down from the bottom of Leicester Square. ‘Vulgarly-peopled,’ according to Madame d’Arblay, even in her father’s time, St. Martin’s Street has since fallen many degrees lower yet. The house to which the fashionable world was drawn by the charms of Burney’s music stands on the east side, immediately above the chapel at the corner of Orange Street. The glass observatory which Dr. Burney repaired, and which he subsequently rebuilt when it was blown away by a gale of wind, has long since disappeared. It was replaced by a wooden erection, or what Macaulay calls ‘a square turret,’ which, when the essayist wrote, distinguished the house from all the surrounding buildings. This erection also has been removed, but the house itself cannot be mistaken by any passer-by who cares to see it.

A tablet on the front bears the inscription: ‘Sir Isaac Newton, philosopher, lived here.’ The house is at present the quarters of the United Service Warrant Officers’ Club. No great effort is required to imagine the plain, silent Newton passing in and out of that slender doorway. The movements of the man qui genus humanum ingenio superavit were without noise and ostentation. We may let half a century go by in thought, and with equal ease picture to ourselves David Garrick tripping up the steps before breakfast; Samuel Johnson rolling up them for a call, on his way to dine with Mrs. Montagu; pleasant Dr. Burney briskly setting out on his daily round of lessons; and demure Miss Fanny sallying forth to seek an interview incognita with her publisher. But how call up the scene, when the lacqueys of Count Orloff—Orloff the Big, Walpole calls him—thundered at the knocker, or when officers of the Household, displaying the ensigns of their rank, peers with stars and orders, and great ladies arrayed in brocaded silks and immense head-dresses, followed one another up a confined staircase into a couple of small and crowded reception-rooms?

Standing opposite to the club where our gallant petty officers of to-day congregate, and noticing that to the left of it, on the other side of Long’s Court, there is now a cheap lodging-house for working men, and that a little further to the left, at the entrance from the Square, the roadway narrows, as we learn from the “Memoirs” that it did in Burney’s time, till there is barely room for a single vehicle of moderate size to pass, we recognise the limitations of the human fancy. It is difficult to conceive of a great aristocratic crowd assembling in such a place. We can understand the pride with which Fanny set down the prolonged rat-tat-tat-tat-too that announced the arrival of each titled and decorated visitor. We may observe the pains she took to draw and colour for her country correspondent groups of dazzling figures such as had never been seen in the more spacious area of Queen Square. But they are gone, and in presence of the dirt and squalor which have made St. Martin’s Street little better than an East-End slum, their shadows will not revisit the glimpses of the moon. Sic transit gloria mundi.”