Melior Place

The name comes from a woman who once owned the ground, not a place she ruled. Melior Place and Melior Street both take their name from Melior Weston, a local 18th-century property owner. One record calls her Melior May Weston. Another, tracing her family's seat at Sutton Place in Surrey, gives her dates as 1703–1782 and calls her Melior Mary Weston, the last of the Weston family and a spinster heiress.

She left her estates to a distant cousin, John Webbe, on condition that he take the Weston name. The ground he inherited had been held by the Westons since about 1623, as the Maze Manor estate. Webbe's inheritance is remembered nearby in Weston Street and Great Maze Pond, both marking the same vanished manor. Melior Street itself is thought to date from this time, along with John Street and Webb Street.

Rocque's map of 1746 shows building beginning here, including one plot marked "Meeting House" — perhaps a Quaker meeting house at the time. By the end of the century the street held small terraced houses without gardens, with open ground beside them that may have served as a communal yard, perhaps with some small industry. Five of these eighteenth-century houses were seriously damaged by bombing in the Second World War.

A Catholic mission opened on the street in 1847, founded by Father Robert Hodgson; its official opening on 20 March 1848 was attended by Bishop Nicholas Wiseman, a friend of his. Father Simon McDaniel took charge of the mission in 1857 and resolved, at the shrine of Our Lady of La Salette in France, to dedicate a new church to her if she helped him build it.

The result, designed by the architect Edmund J. Kelly, opened on 2 May 1861 as Our Lady of La Salette and St Joseph, built for a poor and largely Irish congregation with patterned brick in a Gothic style. Between the wars, the firm of F.A. Walters & Son added fine furnishings to its interior.

On the corner with Snowsfields stands Arthur's Mission, dated 1865.

It adjoins the Manna Day Centre, which gives refuge and food to more than two hundred homeless people a day.

Father Robert Hodgson founded the mission. Bishop Wiseman attended its opening.

Father Simon McDaniel took charge. Tradition holds that, on his way back from vowing abroad to build the church, he also called on the Curé of Ars.

Edmund J. Kelly was the architect.

The street today is really a small yard, not a thoroughfare. In 2019, Melior Place was described as a tightly enclosed pedestrian space, its buildings — the Horseshoe Inn, the Glasshouse Arts Studios, Arthur's Mission — different in form but making up a distinctive small space together.

The Horseshoe Inn was singled out as the space's visual focus, creating a sheltered corner used by its own customers. Street trees were noted as softening its intimate scale. A car park behind 8–20 Snowsfields breaks the definition of neighbouring Vinegar Yard beside the pub.