The greater part of the gardens is now occupied by LOTS ROAD POWER STATION. It was opened in 1905 to provide power for the District Line, which had previously been powered by steam. Eventually, Lots Road was providing power for virtually all of London’s underground and was THE LARGEST POWER STATION IN THE WORLD. At the end of the 20th century the power station ceased to operate and began to undergo conversion into flats.
Brompton Cemetery
Potter’s Inspiration
A LITTLE FURTHER north is Brompton Cemetery, well known to fans of the 2003 Rowan Atkinson film Johnny English, as the scene where English gate-crashes a burial service and has to be led away by his assistant as if he has escaped from an asylum.
BEATRIX POTTER was born near here in 1866, at No. 2 Bolton Gardens, where she grew up and started to write her tales. She must have wandered through Brompton Cemetery from time to time and read the tombstones, for a number of the names on them appear in her books. For instance, there is a Mr Nutkins, a Peter Rabbett, a Jeremiah Fisher and a Mr McGregor.
Among others buried in Brompton Cemetery are the travel author GEORGE BORROW (1803–81); John Keats’s fiancée FANNY BRAWNE; SAMUEL CUNARD (1787–1865), founder of the Cunard Line; suffragette leader EMMELINE PANKHURST (1858–1928); SAMUEL SMILES (1812–1904), author of the popular Samuel Smiles Self Help books; JOHN WISDEN (1826–84), the finest all-round cricketer of his day and founder of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, and SUB-LIEUTENANT REGINALD WARNEFORD (1891–1915), who was awarded the Victoria Cross in the First World War for being THE FIRST MAN TO SHOOT DOWN A GERMAN ZEPPELIN.
Brompton Cemetery is managed by the Royal Parks and is LONDON’S ONLY CROWN CEMETERY.
King’s Road
Fashion Street
KING’S ROAD WAS laid out by Charles II as a route from the Palace at Westminster to Hampton Court. Only those with a King’s Pass were allowed to use it.
British PUNK ROCK was born at No. 430 Kings Road, where VIVIENNE WESTWOOD and MALCOLM MCLAREN opened their Let It Rock boutique in 1971. McLaren launched the celebrated SEX PISTOLS at the shop in 1975. Still outside is a large clock that runs very fast backwards.
Now a food store and restaurant, the BLUEBIRD GARAGE on the King’s Road was THE LARGEST MOTOR GARAGE IN EUROPE when it was built in 1924. Accommodation was provided for lady drivers only.
The Bluebird Garage
WILLIAM FRIESE-GREENE, the movie pioneer who took some of the very first moving pictures ever seen (see Hyde Park Corner), had his first laboratory in the King’s Road at No. 206 – now occupied, appropriately enough, by the Chelsea Cinema. A plaque to him can be seen high up on the façade of the building.
The exotic-looking PHEASANTRY, at No. 152 King’s Road, was originally a shop selling, oddly enough, pheasants. In 1916 Leo Tolstoy’s great-niece, Russian ballet dancer PRINCESS SERAPHINA ASTAFIEVA, opened a dancing academy on the first floor, where her pupils included DAME ALICIA MARKOVA and DAME MARGOT FONTEYN. In the 1960s, ERIC CLAPTON, then guitarist with the Cream, managed to escape out of a back window when the police raided his apartment there looking for drugs. Today the Pheasantry is a pizza restaurant.
No. 120 King’s Road was, until 1966, the site of THE FIRST BATH, LAVATORY AND SINK SHOWROOM IN THE WORLD. It belonged to THOMAS CRAPPER & CO., who manufactured lavatorial equipment at their works in nearby Marlborough Road (now Draycott Avenue). No. 120 is now, needless to say, a boutique.
Across the road is ROYAL AVENUE, the home address of James Bond and, more recently, SIR RICHARD ROGERS the architect. At the end of the 1950s, the American film director JOSEPH LOSEY came to live at No. 30 to escape the McCarthy witch hunts and set one of his best-known films, The Servant, starring Dirk Bogarde, Sarah Miles and James Fox, in the empty house opposite his own. When BRITAIN’S FIRST AMERICAN-STYLE DRUGSTORE, the CHELSEA DRUGSTORE, opened at the end of Royal Avenue in 1968, Losey led the residents in protest and the drugstore was forced to close in 1971. It did, however, find brief fame. Scenes from the movie A Clockwork Orange were filmed there, and the store is mentioned in the Rolling Stones song ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, which contains the line: ‘So I went to the Chelsea Drugstore to get your prescription filled.’ It is now a hamburger joint.
Well, I never knew this
ABOUT
CHELSEA
Chelsea has given its name to a bun, a porcelain, an ankle-length, elastic-sided boot, and a large, four-wheel-drive vehicle used for the school run, the Chelsea Tractor.
The first CHELSEA BRIDGE, a suspension bridge designed by Thomas Page, was opened in 1858. Weapons and human bones, signs of a battle between the Romans and ancient Britons, were unearthed during excavations for the bridge. The present bridge dates from 1934.
In 1679 NELL GWYNN’S MOTHER is believed to have stumbled, while drunk, into a pond in Chelsea, and drowned.
CHARLES DICKENS was married to 20-year-old Catherine Hogarth in St Luke’s Church in Sydney Street in 1836. The occasion was described by the best man, Thomas Beard, as ‘altogether a very quiet piece of business’.
On 15 March 1969, JUDY GARLAND married her fifth husband, Mickey Deans, at the Registry Office in Chelsea Old Town Hall. Three months later she died from an overdose.
OSCAR WILDE lived at No. 34 Tite Street from 1884 until his arrest in 1895 and wrote most of his best-known works there, sitting at Thomas Carlyle’s desk which he acquired when ‘the Sage of Chelsea’ died in 1881. Wilde enjoyed living in Tite Street because there was always so much going on. One morning he watched Ellen Terry arriving at Whistler’s studio to have her portrait painted and wrote: ‘The street that on a wet and dreary morning had vouchsafed the vision of Lady Macbeth in full regalia magnificently seated in a four-wheeler, can never be as other streets; it must always be full of wonderful possibilities.’ Wilde had a fractious relationship with Whistler, who sometimes found Wilde a bit much. At a party one evening they both overheard someone make a clever quip. ‘I wish I had said that!’ exclaimed Wilde. ‘You will, Oscar, you will,’ Whistler assured him.
Whistler is just one of a number of artists who have lived in Tite Street, sometimes known as ‘Artists’ Row’. John Singer Sargent, Simon Elwes, Augustus John and Julian Barrow are among those who have resided there at one time or another.
Sir Terence Conran opened THE FIRST HABITAT STORE at No. 77 Fulham Road in 1964.
BRITAIN’S FIRST BOUTIQUE, BAZAAR, was opened by MARY QUANT at No. 138a King’s Road in 1955.
The ROYAL COURT THEATRE in Sloane Square became the birthplace of ‘kitchen sink’ drama when John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger was premièred there in 1956.
PETER JONES in Sloane Square is named after PETER REES JONES (1843–1905), the son of a hat manufacturer from Monmouthshire. His first venture was a small shop in Hackney, and he moved to Nos. 4–6 King’s Road, on the site of the present store, in 1877.
KENSINGTON
KENSINGTON – KNIGHTSBRIDGE – SOUTH KENSINGTON – HOLLAND PARK – NOTTING HILL
Kensington Palace – where the world came to mourn
Kensington High Street
No Expense Spared
ONE OF LONDON’S best-kept secrets can be found 100 ft (30 m) up on top of the old Derry & Toms building at 99 Kensington High Street. Laid out in 1938, the KENSINGTON ROOF GARDENS cover 1½ acres (0.6 ha) and form THE BIGGEST ROOF GARDENS IN EUROPE. There are three different gardens, with 500 species of plants, fountains, a stream, ducks, flamingos, a restaurant and a night-club. Since 1981 the gardens have been owned by Richard Branson’s Virgin group and are used for functions and hospitality.
No. 18 Stafford Terrace was the home of LINLEY SAMBOURNE, the Punch cartoonist. The house and contents have been preserved unchanged as an authentic Victorian experience and can be visited at weekends.
KENSINGTON PALACE GARDENS, or ‘Billionaire’s Boulevard’ which runs between Notting Hill Gate and Kensington High Street behind Kensington Palace, is regarded as London’s most exclusive address. It is certainly Lond
on’s most expensive address. In 2005 Britain’s richest man, steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, is thought to have paid Bernie Ecclestone £70 million for Nos. 18–19 Kensington Palace Gardens – making it, at the time, THE MOST EXPENSIVE HOUSE IN THE WORLD.
Kensington Palace
Fit for a Princess
AT THE END of August 1997, Kensington Palace was the focus of one of the most extraordinary and spontaneous exhibitions of public mourning ever witnessed in Britain, when thousands of people made their way to the home of Diana, Princess of Wales, to lay flowers at the gates in her memory. Her death in a car crash in a Paris tunnel profoundly traumatised the nation, and by coming to Kensington, the backdrop to so many of the news bulletins and photographs of Diana that had become a daily part of people’s lives, not just in Britain but around the world, many felt they could express their respect for the ‘People’s Princess’.
Although the presence of Diana, Princess of Wales, had helped to raise the profile of Kensington Palace a little, it had always been a relatively unobtrusive feature of London. The events of August and September 1997 changed all that, as pictures of the golden gates, piled high with carpets of flowers, flashed around the world.
Kensington Palace has been in the royal family since the 17th century when William III, an asthmatic, acquired what was then Nottingham House as a London residence away from the smoke of the city. Although St James’s Palace remained the official royal residence, William and Mary asked Christopher Wren to modify and improve Kensington, and they lived there for the rest of their lives. Queen Mary died of smallpox there in 1694, and in 1702 William was brought there after his horse had stumbled on a molehill and thrown him while he was out riding at Hampton Court. His injury was only a broken collarbone, but while resting beside an open window at Kensington he caught a chill and died.
Queen Anne moved in, and Sir John Vanbrugh designed the Orangery for her while William Kent redesigned many of the rooms inside, in particular the principal stateroom known as the Cupola Room. George I and George II lived at Kensington, but after George II died there in 1760, George III moved out to Buckingham House and Kensington became a home to minor royals. William IV’s brother the Duke of Kent lived there, and in 1819 his wife gave birth to a daughter, Victoria, who was christened in the Cupola Room. It was at Kensington that Victoria was told of her accession to the throne as Queen in 1837.
Queen Mary, grandmother of the present Queen, was born at Kensington Palace in 1867. Charles and Diana, the Prince and Princess of Wales, moved to Kensington in 1981 and it remained Diana’s home until her death in 1997. Latterly it has been the official residence of the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, and Prince and Princess Michael of Kent.
The marble statue of Queen Victoria that looks out over the Round Pond was carved by Victoria’s own daughter PRINCESS LOUISE.
At the north end of the Broad Walk in Kensington Gardens, by the Black Lion Gate, is the Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Playground. There has been a playground there since the start of the 20th century. J.M. Barrie donated a set of swings in 1912, and in 1928 Ivor Innes carved the enchanting ‘Elfin Oak’, which still stands at the entrance to the playground, having been saved by Spike Milligan.
Knightsbridge
Harvey Nicks and Harrods
KNIGHTSBRIDGE IS NAMED after a bridge across the Westbourne River, on which two medieval knights fought a duel. The river, now covered over, flows here from the Serpentine in Hyde Park and goes on to make its way to the Thames inside a metal tube that runs above the platforms at Sloane Square Station.
In 1987 one of the biggest robberies in British history was perpetrated at the KNIGHTSBRIDGE SAFETY DEPOSIT CENTRE, when thieves masterminded by Italian Valerio Viccei managed to circumvent the security guards, video cameras, self-locking doors and alarms to break open deposit boxes and escape with £60 million of loot. One month later Viccei and his accomplices were caught and were later convicted of the crime.
Knightsbridge is home to two of London’s most glamourous stores, HARVEY NICHOLLS, affectionally know as ‘HARVEY NICKS’ and a favourite of the late Princess Diana, and HARRODS, now owned by the Qatari royal family. Occupying a block of some 5 acres (2 ha) and with over one million square feet (92,000 sq m) of selling space, Harrods is the LARGEST DEPARTMENT STORE IN BRITAIN’.
In 1834 CHARLES HENRY HARROD (1799–1885) started a wholesale grocery business in Stepney and moved to Knightsbridge in 1849 to take advantage of the forth coming Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. In 1898 THE FIRST ESCALATORS IN BRITAIN were installed at Harrods by manager Richard Burbage, who disliked lifts. Ladies who made it to the top were offered brandy to calm their vapours.
Despite their boast that ‘Harrods serves the world’ and their motto of ‘Omnia Omnibus Ubique’ meaning ‘All Things for All People Everywhere’, there has only ever been one overseas branch of Harrods, established in 1912 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Harrods in Knightsbridge, however, has a HIGHER PROPORTION OF FORGEIGN-BORN CUSTOMERS THAN ANY OTHER STORE IN LONDON, and also offers overseas customers the chance to fly into London for their shopping in an Air Harrods helicopter, liveried in the Harrods colours of green and gold.
On 17 December 1983 a car bomb exploded in a side street next to Harrods, killing three police officers and three members of the public and injuring 90 others. The following day the IRA admitted planting the bomb.
South Kensington
Museum Mile
BRITAIN’S LARGEST CONCENTRATION of museums, consisting of the Victoria and Albert, Natural History and Science Museums, came together near Hyde Park as a result of the Great Exhibition in 1851.
In July 1973 the Victoria and Albert Museum became THE FIRST MUSEUM IN BRITAIN TO PRESENT A ROCK CONCERT, with a combined concert/lecture by British progressive folk-rock band Gryphon.
Natural History Museum
No. 38 Onslow Square was the home of ADMIRAL ROBERT FITZROY, founder of the Met Office and commander of HMS Beagle, which carried Charles Darwin on the voyage that resulted in the Theory of Evolution. FitzRoy committed suicide here in 1865, driven to it by guilt, it is thought, over the part he played in helping to develop the theory that cast doubts on the truth of the Bible.
Victoria and Albert Museum
JOSEPH HANSOM (1803–82), inventor of the hansom cab, lived at No. 28 Sumner Place; SIR HERBERT BEERBOHM TREE (1853–1917), the actor-manager, lived at No. 31 Rosary Gardens; figurative painter FRANCIS BACON (1909–92) lived at No. 7 Cromwell Place, and comedian BENNY HILL (1924–92) lived at Nos. 1–2 Queen’s Gate.
Holland Park
Party Time
ALTHOUGH SMALL, HOLLAND Park is one of the loveliest of London’s green spaces, with a mix of woodland walks, rose and rock gardens, the Kyoto Japanese garden built for the 1991 London festival of Japan, peacocks, rabbits and squirrels, and possibly the best children’s adventure playground in the centre of London.
It is all laid out in the former grounds of HOLLAND HOUSE, a huge Jacobean pile built around 1606 for James I’s Chancellor, Sir Walter Cope, which passed eventually to the 1st Earl of Holland. The widow of the 3rd Earl married JOSEPH ADDISON, founder of The Spectator, who would pace up and down the 100 ft (30 m) Long Gallery, allowing himself a glass of wine at each end to oil the writing process. He must indeed have thought ‘the bounteous hand with worldly bliss has made my cup run o’er’. Addison died in the house in 1719.
During the early part of the 19th century Holland House became a centre for Whig society and noted for its literary salons attended by writers such as Sheridan, Wordsworth, Scott, Dickens and Macaulay. Lord Byron met Lady Caroline Lamb for the first time at a party there in 1812. Around this time Lady Holland laid out the formal gardens and planted THE FIRST DAHLIAS EVER GROWN IN ENGLAND on the terrace of the Dutch garden.
At the end of the 19th century Holland House became known for its lavish garden parties and masked balls, thrown by Lord Ilchester’s wife, the inspiration for Bertie
Wooster’s ‘good and deserving’ Aunt Dahlia in P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster tales. The house received a direct hit during the Blitz and which was left eventually in the care of Kensington Council. The relatively undamaged east wing was converted into a Youth Hostel, and the various outhouses were turned into restaurants and exhibition centres. Operas are performed on the terraces in summer.
To the south of Holland Park is MELBURY ROAD, on the site of the Dower of Holland House, where the artist G.F. WATTS lodged for 30 years, and where he embarked on his disastrous marriage to the actress Ellen Terry. The spectacular red-brick TOWER HOUSE in Melbury Road was built, in the Victorian Gothic style, by the architect of Cardiff Castle and Castel Coch in Wales, WILLIAM BURGES as a home for himself. In the 1960s it was the home of the actor RICHARD HARRIS. Around the corner in Holland Park Road is the home of the first artist to be given a peerage LORD LEIGHTON, whose house is run today as a museum and art gallery.
EDINA MONSOON, the lead character played by Jennifer Saunders in the BBC situation comedy Absolutely Fabulous, lives at No. 34 Claremont Avenue in Holland Park. Lionel and Jean, the characters played by Geoffrey Palmer and Judi Dench in the BBC comedy As Time Goes By, also have a home in Holland Park, an area which is popular with well-heeled BBC producers and presenters.
Notting Hill
Now
NOTTING HILL IS one of those places, like Primrose Hill or Bloomsbury, that have a ‘set’. The Notting Hill Set revolves around intellectual and wealthy young political types in tune with Green issues and eager to lead Britain into the 21st century.
I Never Knew That About London Page 20