Sir Samuel Morton Peto

Through his Maddox connections, Scott obtained an introduction to Morton Peto, who ‘had just left’ when Scott started at Maddox's. Sir Samuel Morton Peto Bt., as he was to become, was one of the great figures of the nineteenth century building world. He had been apprenticed to his uncle Henry Peto, one of the builders in 1826 of John Nash's Park Crescent and succeeded to the business with his cousin, Thomas Grissell, in 1830. One of the first major works of the new firm was the reconstruction of the run-down vegetable market, which in the seventeenth century had been built on the site of the Hungerford family house, between The Strand and the River Thames. Plans were drawn up by Charles Fowler, who had already rebuilt Covent Garden Market, for a magnificent classical design with Italianate piazzas at two levels surrounded by Doric colonnades, separated by a large market hall. The site was very awkward, 475 feet long and only 126 feet wide with a drop in level from The Strand down to the river of approximately twenty feet. In fact the whole area was excavated, providing two stories of vaults at The Strand end. Grissell and Peto ‘specially stationed’ Scott at Hungerford Market. In 1845, Peto retired from his firm to enter Parliament.