 The area was ripe for redevelopment by the landholding elite, who wished to have suitably grand townhouses to occupy while attending Parliament and the court. The vestiges of the Privy Garden became the site of a new street. In 1808 a row of houses called Whitehall Gardens was constructed on the site. Behind each house, long grassy gardens planted with rows of trees led directly down to the river, until they were cut off by the construction of the Victoria Embankment along the river bank between 1865 and 1870. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli lived in one of the houses between 1873 and 1875, while Sir Robert Peel lived in another (and died there in 1850 after falling from his horse on Constitution Hill). The trees outside the front entrance to Whitehall Gardens were the last survivors of the original Privy Garden, and stood until as recently as the late 1930s.
