The street has always been a preferred residential address, in which the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the actress Peggy Ashcroft as well as the scientist J. D. Bernal and Peter Medawar resided.
The Gothic Revival architect Temple Moore and later, during the First World War, the literary figures Constance, Edward and David Garnett lived in house number 6.
At the turn of the century, the actor Edward Gordon Craig and the composer Martin Shaw shared house number 8.
Soon after, the writer Elizabeth Jenkins moved to the Regency House and named her 2004 memoir (The View from Downshire Hill) after the street.
The poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti lived with his wife Elizabeth Siddal for a short time in the neighboring Spring Cottage.