The Harley Street Medical Area is a cluster of streets in Marylebone, central London, where private medicine has concentrated since the nineteenth century. More than 3,000 people now work across its clinics, practices and hospitals.
It is bigger than one street
Harley Street runs north from Cavendish Square. The medical district spread long ago into the streets around it — Wimpole Street, Devonshire Place, Queen Anne Street, Weymouth Street, Devonshire Street and others nearby.
A practice on any of them may reasonably describe itself as being in the Harley Street area, and most do, because the name is the one people recognise. So “Harley Street” in a clinic’s marketing does not necessarily mean the building is on Harley Street.
That is not deception. It is just worth knowing that the term describes a district rather than a doorway.
How the rooms work
This is the part that changes how the address should be read.
A great many doctors in the area do not own or lease premises. They rent consulting rooms by the session — a morning, a day, a regular slot each week — from companies and clinics that let them out. It is an ordinary and sensible arrangement: a consultant seeing private patients one day a week has no reason to hold a lease on a Georgian townhouse.
But it means the address attaches to the room, not to the person. Several different practitioners may use the same room across a week.
The relevant question is what checking the room’s landlord does. Some serviced consulting room providers verify registration, insurance and references before letting to anyone. Others ask for considerably less. There is no single standard across the district, and no body that vets everyone practising in it.
So an address in the Harley Street area tells you someone has paid for a room there. It is not a credential and it was never designed to function as one.
What is genuinely there
A good deal, and it would be unfair to leave the impression otherwise.
The district contains major private hospitals, specialist centres with real depth in particular fields, and a very large number of consultants who also hold senior NHS posts. For many conditions there is a concentration of expertise within a few hundred metres that exists almost nowhere else in the country.
The reputation was earned. It simply cannot be transferred by postcode to an individual you have not checked.
Checking rather than assuming
How to check a doctor’s credentials is the practical guide. What the titles mean covers the words that appear alongside the address and which of them are protected.
The history explains how the reputation accumulated, which is interesting in itself and also makes clear why it cannot do the job people ask of it.