Hunter Street, Brunswick Square
	Ruskin was born in no. 54, Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, a three-story house with attic and basement that formed part of a recently built terrace (see Hilton, Early Years 9 [pl. 3]). Brunswick Square and Mecklenburgh Squares—both built in the early 1800s, and associated with quiet, respectable merchants—adjoined the grounds of the Foundling Hospital, creating a large, open space in the city. “Before the hospital,” as described in an 1834 guide to London, was “a large piece of ground, on each side of which” ran “a colonnade of great length,” extending to the hospital gates. “The large area between the gates and the hospital [was] adorned with grass-plats, gravel walks, and lamps erected upon handsome posts” (Partington, Views of London 1:98). Nearby were Russell Square and the British Museum.
	These squares in and around Bloomsbury and St. Pancras encroached on an area that was open fields and farms at the end of the eighteenth century. If the Ruskins chose to live in relatively bucolic surroundings—here and, from 1824, in Camberwell—these areas also represented the heady expansion of London during the first decades of the century. The squares lined with uniform, brick terraces were the creation of Thomas Cubitt, whose building company in Gray’s Inn Road employed a permanent staff of bricklayers, masons, and tradesmen (Margetson, Regency London 139).
	A fellow inhabitant of Brunswick Square was Bryan Procter, “Barry Cornwall,” who, until the year of Ruskin’s birth, practiced with a law firm there, and who was already becoming known as a literary figure. Possibly in the Ruskins’ time, a house in the square was known for its collection of manuscripts, books, and paintings, including important works by Joshua Reynolds (Chancellor, Squares of London 243–44).