Isaac Newton in London

In 1696, while in his mid-fifties, Newton decided to swap his relatively private, scholarly routine in Cambridge for a much more public one in London. It was a move that would transform his life. 

Stories of Newton from his Cambridge years fit – and partly inspired – our image of the abstracted professor or scientific genius. His fellow students and colleagues recalled him as someone so lost in thought that he would forget to finish dressing or know whether he had eaten. 

One of Newton’s motivations for leaving Cambridge may have been a recent nervous breakdown, perhaps caused or exacerbated by his intense study of alchemy and theology, as well as the physical sciences.

Feeling that his creative days were behind him, and perhaps also for more personal reasons of friendship and his nonconformist religious belief, he sought alternative employment in the capital.
 

London Metropolitan Archives

Newton first resided in Haydon Square, close to the Mint in the Tower of London. After becoming President of the Royal Society and knighted, he moved in 1710 to the fashionable West End district of Leicester fields (now Leicester Square), taking up a grand four-storey town house in St Martin’s Street.

Newton showed little interest in the city’s artistic scene, shirking theatres or music. According to one friend, he ran out halfway way through an opera – the first and last that he attended.

His view on art was similar. Upon seeing the Earl of Pembroke’s renowned collection of statues, he remarked that his host was ‘a lover of stone dolls’. Literature and poetry apparently did not impress him either, the latter he deemed as ‘a kind of ingenious nonsense’. 

Instead of artistic leisure, Newton spent his private time studying, following the same philosophical interests he had in Cambridge. 

However, his life was not without some aesthetic preferences. In his furnishings, he had a passion for the colour red – crimson draperies, crimson mohair bed with crimson curtains, crimson sofa – in fact, crimson was the only colour mentioned in the inventory of his belongings. 

Lent by the Royal Society

Newton’s fame at his death is testified to by his celebration in London and beyond. He was buried with due pomp in Westminster Abbey, where his memorial was later erected.

He was eulogised at the Académie des sciences in Paris and celebrated in verse, prose and paint across Europe. Alexander Pope, London’s sharpest poet and satirist at the time of Newton’s death, penned this now-famous epitaph:

Newtonian philosophy dominated 18th century scientific thought, discussed and disseminated in London’s coffee houses, lecture halls and learned societies.

Newton’s cultural influence on the city is visible today. Outside one of London and Britain’s foremost scholarly institutions, the British Library, sits Eduardo Paolozzi’s giant bronze sculpture depicting Newton with a pair of dividers plotting the universe – inspired by the painting by another famous Londoner, William Blake (1757-1827).