The terraced houses in the square surround a communal garden that is open to the public during the day but locked at night.

West Square has the following entry in Volume XXV of the Survey of London, published in 1955 by the then London County Council:[1] "The largest of the several plots of ground in St George's Fields which belonged in the mid-18th century to Henry Bartelote and then to the West family was the close lying south of St George's Road, between Moulton's Close (the Imperial War Museum) and the ground belonging to Hayle's estate.— Colonel Temple West died in 1784, leaving his freehold estate in St George's Fields to his wife Jane during her life, and after her death, to his eldest son, Temple, in tail male.

Most of the houses on the north, east and west sides of the square were completed and occupied by 1794, and the majority still remain; they are nearly all three-storied.

36, on the east side of the square, for the shutter telegraph apparatus used to convey messages between Whitehall and New Cross, and thence to and from Chatham and Sheerness.

King Edward's Schools (closed and demolished in the 1930s) occupied the eastern side, together with an area of drying posts.

A blue plaque, installed by the Royal Society of Chemistry, commemorates Newlands on the front of the house.

[3] Sharman opened several orphanages around the country, including Gravesend, Newton Abbott, Tunbridge Wells and Hastings.

[3] The orphanage building on Austral Street (formerly South Street) was purchased and became All Saints' Hospital and then, in the late 1980s, was purchased by the Imperial War Museums as the All Saints Annexe, to house staff offices, archive stores and a public reading room.

It was there, somewhere around the age of three, we lived in a large house.At the end of the 19th century, the garden in the square was threatened with building development, but there was a campaign to keep it.

However, after the Second World War, it was proposed that the buildings should be demolished and the area added to Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park.

The west side of the square was also much-altered, with pairs of houses being run together to create four lateral flats in each property.

Overall, the square remains largely intact and of historic interest, a fact reflected in the 1972 Grade II listing of the east, south and wide sides.