Jermyn Street takes its name from Henry Jermyn, Earl of St. Albans, to whose trustees the whole of Pall Mall Field was leased in 1661 by the trustees of Henrietta Maria for thirty years. Subsequent grants extended this leasehold term to 1740. The grant of the freehold of St. James's Square in 1665 to the Earl's trustees included part of the ground on the south side of Jermyn Street which the Earl already held on lease.

On 1 April 1661 the Earl's trustees granted leases for twenty-three plots in Jermyn Street, of which nineteen were on the north side and extended north to Piccadilly; all these leases were for twenty-one years from Michaelmas 1660. All the leases which his trustees subsequently granted of land in Jermyn Street were for terms ranging from forty-one to fifty years.

The street is first mentioned by name in the ratebooks of St. Martin's for 1667, where it is called 'Jarman Streete'; there are 56 entries, of which 36 relate to the north side. In 1675 108 names are recorded, 54 on each side. Ogilby and Morgan's map shows that the building of houses along both sides of the street had been completed by 1681-2.

Jermyn Street did not originally provide access either at its west end to St. James's Street or at its east end to the Haymarket. Houses had been built along these two streets a few years earlier than in Jermyn Street, and it may be that the abrupt termination of the extremities of the latter was due rather to the difficulty and expense of buying and demolishing a number of the existing houses in St. James's Street and the Haymarket than to any deliberate design. Eventually by 1746 a narrow opening (called Little Jermyn Street) to St. James's Street had been made, and at the eastern end a passage called Hammonds Court led to the Haymarket. John Nash's plan for the formation of the New Street (now Regent Street) from Carlton House to Marylebone Park provided also for the widening of the west end of Jermyn Street and for the continuation of the east end into the Haymarket, and these improvements were executed in 1819. The formation of Regent Street also involved the demolition of a number of houses in Jermyn Street.

The freehold of about half of Jermyn Street still belongs to the Crown. Besides the church, churchyard and glebe land (the latter now occupied by Nos. 36-40 Jermyn Street) the most notable exception is the range of houses on the south side of the street, comprising Nos. 88- 107. They stand due north of St. James's Square and their site formed part of the ground granted freehold by the Crown to the Earl of St. Albans's trustees in 1665. Most of the oldest surviving houses in Jermyn Street, notably Nos. 88- 90, 93, 95-96, 98-99, stand in this range, which has been unaffected by the policy of periodic rebuilding exercised over Crown property.

The block on the south-east corner of Jermyn Street and Duke Street (Nos. 80-87 Jermyn Street and Nos. 18-20 Duke Street) was part of the Crown estate until 1830. In that year the Crown granted this and other property between Jermyn Street and Piccadilly to the Governors of Bethlem Hospital. The Governors have owned this property at the corner of Jermyn Street and Duke Street ever since and the hospital's coat of arms can be seen fixed to the outside walls of several of the houses. They may be 'the arms in Iron' ordered to be fixed on all the hospital's buildings in 1836. The property between Piccadilly and Jermyn Street (much of which is now occupied by Messrs. Fortnum and Mason) has all been rebuilt since it was acquired by the hospital, but on the south side of Jermyn Street much less rebuilding has taken place.

From an early date there was a marked difference in the social status of the inhabitants of the western and eastern halves of Jermyn Street. Most of the more highly rated houses stood to the west of the church, and a number of them were occupied by persons of note. To the east of the church the rateable value of the houses declined progressively, due no doubt to their proximity to St. James's Market. Some of them were occupied as shops on the ground floor and as lodgings above. On his visits to London Thomas Gray, the poet, stayed in Jermyn Street 'at Roberts's the hosiers, or at Frisby's the oilman's. They are towards the east end, on different sides of the street.' Gray 'dined generally alone, and was served from an eating house near his lodging'.

In 1815 Jermyn Street was said to contain 'a whole range of hotels. . . . All the articles of consumption are of the best; and the accommodations, much to the injury of taverns and lodging-houses, combine all the retirement and comforts of home with the freedom of access, egress, and ingress, which one generally expects when abroad.' On the north side were Reddish's, Blake's and Topham's, and on the south side Miller's, and the St. James's. The latter was situated half-way between Duke Street and Bury Street; Sir Walter Scott stayed there for three weeks in the summer of 1832, immediately before his final journey to Abbotsford, where he died on 21 September. Nos. 85-86 Jermyn Street were occupied from 1830 until 1903 by the Waterloo Hotel, later the Hotel Jules.

Messrs. J. Lyons and Company's first teashop at No. 213 Piccadilly proved so successful that they entered into an agreement with the Office of Woods and Forests in January 1895 for a building lease of Nos. 18-20 Jermyn Street, adjoining their premises to the south. They intended to redevelop this property as an extension to their refreshment room, with chambers or flats on the upper floors.

The Jermyn Street range was begun in 1896 and completed in 1897 as Gordon Chambers. The four shops on the ground floor were renumbered as 18-21 Jermyn Street. The building has a crowded stone front five storeys in height, with a garret in the roof. Triple Ionic pilasters of red granite divide its ground storey into five bays, the centre one containing a pedimented doorway and the outer ones shop windows, while above them run a tall fascia and a cornice.

The original house on this site was one of four erected by William Younge about 1674. From 1783, at least, it has been occupied by dealers in liquor. In that year, when it was occupied by John Hickin(g)bottom, proprietor of the British Hotel, it was described as an old building, and wine vaults below were mentioned. Samuel Rickards of Piccadilly, distiller, then owned the Crown lease.

The name of the present public house, the Bunch of Grapes, appears first in the Post Office Directories in 1912, but there was a tavern of the same name somewhere in Jermyn Street in 1759. George Raggett and Sons, ale and stout merchants, occupied part of the house for a time; they vacated it in 1907.

The present hotel occupies three houses in Jermyn Street, No. 81, with a frontage of about forty feet, and Nos. 82 and 83, each with a frontage of about twenty feet. No. 81 was one of four houses erected about 1674 by William Younge. Although it has undergone many alterations it appears never to have been completely rebuilt at one period. In the 1680's it was occupied by Sir Robert Gayre or Geere, who gave a set of plate to the parish church and from 1706 to 1729 by Henry Paget, first Earl of Uxbridge.

For a short period in the 1830's the hotel was called the Orlés Hotel but in 1836 its name was changed to the Cavendish. It became famous under the management of Mrs. Rosa Lewis, who succeeded Excelsior Lewis and became proprietress in 1904.

This was one of the three houses assigned in 1720 to Richard Waring, but unlike the other two (Nos. 82 and 83) it was apparently not rebuilt within the next few years. In 1811, when Robert Miller, who had probably used the house for his wine-merchant's business, held the Crown lease, it was said to be old 'but substantial' and required only about £300 to be spent on repairs. He received a new lease in 1816 and covenanted to spend not less than £00 in repairs by September 1817.

This is the best of the original houses in Jermyn Street, both in quality and state of preservation, although like the others it has lost its ground storey to a modern shop-front. Now containing a basement, four storeys and a garret, it has a stuccoed front, three windows wide, with raised bandcourses at second- and third-floor levels, and box-frames in the second- and third-storey windows, though not the original ones. The fourth storey may be a later addition.

Nos. 98-99 have the best preserved exterior among the original houses, although early nineteenth-century alterations and the insertion of modern shop-fronts have combined to spoil their appearance. Horwood and the Ordnance Survey maps show the building as two houses, with fronts to Jermyn Street, and it appears to have been numbered as two separate houses. However, the structural evidence points to its having been erected as a single building.

Nos. 111a and 112 Jermyn Street and Nos. 7 and 8 Wells (now Babmaes) Street, then occupied by Standen and Co., were rebuilt as a single block (No. 112 Jermyn Street) in 1900-1 for Edward Standen Morphew. The new building was designed as a shop (subdivided in 1954-5) and a woollen warehouse for Standen and Co., with a single main entrance in Jermyn Street.

Notwithstanding some 'Art Nouveau' details, this building is strongly reminiscent of an early Florentine palace, such as the Davanzati, with its great blocks of rugged masonry in the ground storey and the pseudo-loggia below the shadowy crowning cornice. Five-storeyed fronts face on to Jermyn Street and Babmaes Street and linking them is a five-sided angle turret, crowned by an octagonal belvedere with an ogee cupola. The Jermyn Street front contains two wide, segmental arches in the rusticated ground storey, and a pair of three-light mullioned windows in each of the three storeys above, those of the fourth storey having moulded segmental-arched heads. The fifth storey is lit by a series of small windows with round arches rising from Ionic columns resting on consoles, having the effect of a loggia. The turret has windows only in the second, fifth and sixth storeys, and in the Babmaes Street front the threelight windows in the upper face are set well to the south, giving the building an appearance of massive simplicity when viewed from the north-west.