Forgotten buildings:the tower at the top of the hill

For the Victorians the movement of water around London whether for drinking, bathing or washing sewage away was much more than a simple utilitarian process. It was one of the pinnacles of new technology, and an essential part of the growth of civilisation. The mastery of flowing water was one of the great skills of urban living. So the buildings and structures associated with it whether below or above ground were subject to the same aesthetic principles as any other grand public building. Hence the impressive Italianate tower above which stood at the peak of Campden Hill and dominated the local skyline for more than a hundred years. You saw it first in the Towers of Kensington post but as I looked deeper I found quite a few pictures illustrating the tower’s rise and fall.

The Grand Junction Water Works Company acquired the site in 1843 in order to build a high level reservoir but they added the pumping station and the water tower a few years later. The tower did not contain a tank but a series of pipes into which water could be pumped to gain extra pressure to power its subsequent progress through the water network.

The Tower was a popular local sight and can be seen in a number of pictures by local artists my favourite of which is this watercolour by Elizabeth Gladstone:

Remember that spire on the left.

The Grand Junction Water Works Company and all its assets were taken over in 1904 by the Metropolitan Water Board. The tower remained undamaged in both world wars. Here it is in 1964 surmounted by some kind of electronic device:

And again in 1969:

This picture shows the space around the works including part of the covered reservoir. The truncated tower of the “strange and wilful” St George’s Church. Aubrey Walk (1863) is visible behind the works and the tower block on the right is the equally wilful Campden Hill Towers at Notting Hill Gate.

This 1965 picture shows the intricate detail of the brickwork.

Inside the works was some impressive machinery.

By 1970 the tower was surplus to requirements and the land it stood on ripe for development. As luck would have it our photographer John Rogers was on hand to chronicle its slow demolition. Here the main pipe is exposed.

This was not one of those Fred Dibnah style spectacular demolitions. Because of the solidity of the structure and its closeness to a residential area the tower had to be disassembled almost brick by brick. Here is the first sign of the secondary pipe:

A man is working up there with a hand held jack hammer which would have made progress slow. Gradually the double pipe is revealed:

The pipe falls:

Finally the base is demolished. It is now safe to use a wrecking ball.

You can see how massive the walls of the tower were. The crumbling brickwork spills out of the gate.

The tower is gone. A few short weeks before there was snow on the ground and a family walked up the hill on a chilly February day.

The tower has joined the ranks of vanished buildings left behind as London moves on. But at least its passing was recorded.

Postscript

“Strange and wilful” is one of those slightly odd descriptive phrases from the Survey of London which I have come to treasure. “Pungently Burgundian” is another. If you come across any yourself in the Survey or any other architectural guides please send them. There might be a whole post based on them one day.

Towers of Kensington

Towers aren’t necessarily tall. But they are often unexpected. You see them from a couple of streets away and you’re not quite sure where they are exactly. You glimpse them from an upstairs window. Or sometimes they’re miles away and even when they’re big it’s not always clear where the bottom of the tower lies. You can watch them for years from your bedroom window or walk past them on your way to work and then suddenly they’re gone. Like this one:

This photograph from the early 1900s shows the remains of tower that stood in the grounds of Campden House. Campden House was a very old house which burned down in the 1860s. There was a dispute about the insurance but it was rebuilt. This must have been a piece of the old property which lingered on until it too vanished in the twentieth century.

They liked a tower in the Campden Hill area.

This gothic pile is Tower Cressey which lurked mysteriously at the end of Aubrey Walk near the top of the hill.

The artist, Frank Emmanuel, slightly exaggerates the slope from left to right but Campden Hill is quite steep in parts. A hill is a good place to build a tower and makes it even more imposing but when the German bombers came it was an easy target.

It became a picturesque gothic ruin for a short time in this picture by Gertrude Keeling. Tower Cressey no longer exists but here is a tower which never was:

This impossible view of Kensington Central Library from the south shows the equally impossible tower architect Vincent Harris had planned for Kensington Town Hall. It would have been an act of municipal shock and awe and would have dominated the skyline of Kensington. I don’t think it could ever have been built – it would have been just a bit too tall, and by the time there were serious plans for the site Harris was dead and his moment had passed. But I wish he had left some more drawings of his skyscraper.

In its day this was nearly the tallest tower in Kensington:

The second St Mary Abbots Church glimpsed in the distance as towers should be in this water colour by Elizabeth Gladstone.

When it was completed in 1879 the 250 feet spire was the tallest in London and the sixth tallest in the country.

A view from 1898 showing the original roof over the nave which was destroyed in a WW2 air raid.

The most impressive tower in Kensington and slightly taller than St Mary Abbots lies a little further south.

This is the Imperial Institute about 1920 on its own road Imperial Institute Road. The green domed tower sometimes called the Collcutt Tower after its architect now usually known as the Queen’s tower is all that remains.

The same scene in the 1960s.It’s an old story. When Imperial College was built it was decided to retain the tower. I came to London in 1973. My friend Carl was at Imperial and he took me to see the tower looking alone and immense in the setting of the college. And unfortunately completely closed to the public then. It is possible to arrange visits now I believe but apparently there are a lot of stairs to climb to get to the viewing gallery. Perhaps it’s merely ornamental now but it is a pleasing landmark. There were two secondary towers which were demolished and this is one of them:

You can just about make out Gloucester Road at the junction with Victoria Grove on the left and the lengthy mews behind Queen’s Gate. So we’re pointing west again back towards Campden Hill.

I have one final lost tower for you back on the hill, a tower which stood for a hundred years.

It’s the water tower for the Grand Junction Company water works here seen looking up Campden Hill Gardens but visible on the skyline in many views of Kensington. In a couple of weeks it will have a blog post to itself but next week I’m doing something topical (for 1890).

Postscript

I missed out Tower House but that too will get a post to itself one of these days.

Elegy for the Red House

This week it’s time to tell the story of the Red House.

It was built about 1835 by the brick manufacturer and house builder Stephen Bird for his own family. He called it Hornton Villa and it lay at the top of a large site behind Kensington High Street between Campden Hill Road and Hornton Street. The Villa had the bulk of the site as its garden but shared the site with another stucco villa called Niddry Lodge and another house almost joined to the Villa called Hornton Cottage. Bird died in 1865. It is not clear exactly when Hornton Villa became known as the Red House. It may have been in the 1880s when the Peto brothers added a stable block and made some additions which the Kensington historian W J Loftie regarded as “incongruous” although it would still have looked innocuous when compared to William Abbott’s gothic fantasy the Abbey which was built in 1879 at the southern end of the plot. Abbott also acquired the bulk of the Red House’s garden although it was still left with enough to retain its secluded position.

The man I called the explorer took a lease on the Red House in 1896.

He was William Martin Conway later Baron Conway of Allington Castle – art historian, traveller, mountaineer, author and MP. He lived there with his wife Katrina and their daughter Agnes until 1907. Conway travelled in the Himalayas, Kashmir, the Alps, South America and the Arctic and had a parallel career as an academic . He was director general of the Imperial War Museum from 1917 until his death in 1937.

Katrina aged 16 in 1872

Katrina in 1885

Agnes seen below with her great grandmother particularly loved the house even though she suffered a severe injury there. When she was 14 she and a cousin were playing a particularly risky version of hide and seek on the roof of the house. Fleeing from discovery they crossed over from the Red House to Hornton Cottage. Agnes fell through a skylight into an empty studio. Among her injuries was nerve damage to one side of her face which caused her lifelong difficulty and lengthy medical treatment. Agnes too became a traveller and an archaeologist.

Martin Conway must also have had a strong emotional attachment to the place judging by the many pictures he painted of the interior which you saw last week. It’s hard to place his pictures inside the unremarkable exterior shown in these photographs taken in 1964 and 1972.

After the Conways departed the most notable residents were Herbert Clark Hoover and his wife Lou. Hoover was in his early thirties and was already a millionaire. He came to London as a successful mining engineer with interests in many parts of the world but became involved with organising food relief to Belgium during the Great War. But along with the globetrotting Herbert and Lou were bringing up two young boys and building a collection of books on scientific subjects at the Red House.

Hoover in 1916

Lou Henry Hoover

In his memoirs Hoover also has a roof related story. One night In 1916 Herbert and Lou heard the sounds of a Zeppelin raid. They went to see that their two sons were all right but found the bedroom empty. They scoured the house, even the attic, and found the boys on the roof watching the explosions in the sky. Like the parents you wish you had instead of hauling the boys downstairs Herbert and Lou sat with them and the whole family watched a Zeppelin being shot down. The following day Herbert took the two boys to the crash site to collect a few pieces of the airship.

The Hoovers left the Red House for good later that year but in 1938 after his other career as President was over, Hoover paid a sentimental visit to the Red House. Describing himself as an American gentleman and former resident rather than a former President he convinced the butler to let him in, tipping him with a 10 shilling note so he could stand again in the oak panelled library and remember himself, Lou and the boys together in it. To the discomfort of the butler he lingered over “revived emotional pictures” and “finished him” by shaking his hand.

After the Second World War the Abbey was badly damaged and the Council bought the whole of the site including the Red House, Niddry Lodge and Hornton Cottage. The remains of the Abbey were demolished and the Kensington Library was built in 1959. The Red House and Niddry Lodge were used for Council offices for more than twenty years.

Below,barely visible through the trees Kensington Library

By the early 70s the house was empty. Inside there were only traces of the Red House as it had been. Finally in 1972 the time came for the northern half of the site to be cleared to make way for a new Town Hall.

Here is the Red House in January 1972 still behind its walls and trees:

Now with the walls down and the trees felled, its companion Hornton Cottage already being demolished:

Now in its final weeks. First you see it:

Now you don’t.

These days if you go to the Customer Service Centre at the Town Hall to pay your council tax or get a parking permit you’re somewhere near the Red House. Perhaps it’s possible even now to make an imaginative connection with the man who took these photographs of the Indus Valley in Kashmir and the Matterhorn:

So was there a mystery in the Red House? Two remarkable families lived there and despite the fact that the house itself is utterly gone, through the paintings of one man and the words of another it lives on. That’s a kind of mystery.

Photos of the Hoovers from Volume 1 of Hoover’s Memoirs – The years of adventure 1952

Pictures of the Conways from Joan Evans – The Conways: a history of three generations 1966

Conway’s photos from Episodes in a varied life 1932

Other photos from Library collection

For more on the Abbey see Forgotten buildings: the Abbey in list of posts opposite.

Forgotten Chelsea: scenes you’ll never see

More photographs of old Chelsea this week but these are quite different from the Hedderly pictures. In Hedderly’s day Chelsea was still a suburb. The market gardens and nurseries were still there, some of the big houses and grounds survived, and Cremorne Gardens was still going strong. Thirty years or so later Chelsea was part of the city, only a few of the nurseries were left and Cremorne was already erased, the Gardens covered with housing. The open spaces have been filled in.

You can still see many of the places in Hedderly’s pictures, Rossetti’s house, Belle Vue House, the embankment, a reasonable facsimile of the Old Church. But the remarkable thing about these pictures is that almost everything you see in them is now gone.

You will never look at the north side of the King’s Road from Paultons Square and see houses and gardens like these or take a walk towards Beaufort Street and see the King’s Road Forage Stores with its intriguing Steam Chaff Cutting and Crushing Mill.

Or Osborn and Shearman’s paperhanging manufactory at numbers 332-336. Light industry was cheek by jowl with housing – turn around and look at the south side of the street

These pleasant and permanent looking dwellings on the corner of the King’s Road and Beaufort Street are also gone.

The block below looks familiar.

The buildings look a little like parts of the Fulham Road today but this is the corner of King’s Road and Edith Grove which looks quite different now. That woman striding along with an air of determination is walking past a missing piece of London.

This was Camera Square, off the northern section of Beaufort Street.

It was thought to be a bit of a slum at the time and after the Great War it was demolished and replaced by the rather more upmarket dwellings in the garden suburb style Chelsea Park Gardens.

Here is another side street off the King’s Road:

I think this is the eastern side of Manresa Road showing Wentworth Villa and Studios where several artists worked undisturbed through a large part of the 20^th century. This is a view a little further down the road:

These buildings were opposite the first Chelsea Library which has survived through the years although it is no longer a library.

Moving eastwards you come to Sydney Street.

The Wilkinson Sword Company had their Oakley Works here. Just beyond it is this row of buildings:

The street on the right is Upper Manor Street. Later there was a Post Office on this site.

Turn back to the south side again. This is the south section of Manor Street in 1901:

Demolition is under way. The whole street has an air of impermanence as if it hadn’t yet decided what sort of street it was going to be.

There is more than a hint of what is to come at the Sloane Square end of the road.

This picture from October 1900 shows the previous incarnation of the Peter Jones store, a building gone but definitely not forgotten.

One final place for you to go, up Sloane Street and into Sloane Terrace.

The Wesleyan Chapel, replaced by the grander Christian Science church which is now Cadogan Hall. But don’t linger, there’s something I want to show you round the corner.

This is D’Oyley Street, and that is the Woodman Tavern. As I promised you at the start almost everything in these pictures is gone. But do you see that hanging sign? That is still with us in a library archive room, a survivor against the odds.

One of these days I’ll show you a close up of it as it is today.

18th Century glamour girl: searching for Miss Chudleigh

The story so far: three actresses from the Chelsea Pageant of 1908 have traveled back to the 1740s to meet celebrity bigamist Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston and / or Countess of Bristol at the Venetian Masquerade in Ranelagh Gardens. Now read on:

We caught a glimpse of Miss Chudleigh last week in the six thousand-strong crowd at the Royal Jubilee Venetian Masquerade which was held on April 26^th 1749 (when she was still only married to one man, but was keeping it a secret so she could still have an income as one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour). Her scandalous costume was of Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon, ready for sacrifice. According to the story Iphigenia was lured by the promise of a marriage to Achilles to the place where the Greek fleet was to set sail to Troy to become an offering to Artemis, the goddess her father had offended. At the last minute she was spirited away by magic and replaced by an animal, a deer or a stag. Miss Chudleigh’s costume was said to have been so revealing that the high priest could already see her entrails. There were many artistic renditions of the costume.

Not one of the more flattering versions, here she is accompanied by a gesticulating carnival goer, and Mr Punch, himself no stranger to human sacrifice. Here is a more pleasing version:

She wouldn’t have been Duchess of Kingston at the time of course so this must be a much later picture. The problem for both artists is that she didn’t actually wear the revealing outfit at Ranelagh. She did wear some kind of controversial costume four days later at a private Subscription Masquerade at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, a far more exclusive occasion at which she made a favourable impression on the King but outraged some of the other guests.  No accurate description of what she was wearing that night exists, although there has been sufficient speculation for the dress to be famous after two centuries.

She would have been at Ranelagh though, perhaps in conventional dress, perhaps masked in a fanciful costume so our trio of actresses could encounter her in the throng, either outside by the Chinese Pavilion and canal:

Or watching one of the stranger performances in the Gardens:

It might be safer to look inside the Rotunda amongst the dancers, as in this Cruickshank print.

She might have been dressed more like this later portrait:

In any case with music, dancing and fireworks, it was a spectacular celebration.

Iphigenia also provided the inspiration for a song performed at Ranelagh:

The story of Iphigenia and Cymon comes from Boccaccio’s Decameron rather than Greek myth (hence the modern dress?)

Lord Leighton later rendered the subject more artistically:

The celebrations went on till a late hour. Maybe our actresses found Miss Chudleigh, maybe they didn’t but once the Masquerade is finished the Rotunda lies empty.

The fire in the former orchestra stalls is burning down.

It was said that at night with the light still burning the Rotunda looked like an enormous lantern.

The Misses Jourdain and Moberly reported that at the end of their strange experience at Versailles the world seemed to flatten out and drain of colour and sound when they were about to return to their own time. Perhaps our time travelers are now experiencing something similar. Attentive readers will already have realized that our three actresses have entered the world not only of Elizabeth Chudleigh but of a woman we already know the mysterious Marianne Rush. The empty interior is one of her pictures. Look at this detail from the night picture:

Two women walk off into the night. For one of our travelers the journey is not yet over. She is about to enter the mysterious world of Marianne Rush. See you next week.

Forgotten buildings – The Abbey

What was here before? Many people ask that question about their house or their street and sometimes the answer is just some other houses that people lived in for a while which got demolished when the time was right. Sometimes the answer is it was fields or farmland or just unoccupied open space. Rarely the answer is that something remarkable and unique stood on this spot. Something which has now vanished so completely that you might never have known about it.

The Abbey, although it was sufficiently gothic in style to look like an actual abbey, was not a religious establishment. It was more like a latter day version of Strawberry Hill, the gothic dwelling built by Horace Walpole author of the first gothic novel the Castle of Otranto. Or a film set for a novel by Mrs Radcliffe or one of those other popular novelists which Jane Austen gently satirised in Northanger Abbey. Most bizarrely of all it was just yards from Kensington High Street which was then a classic Victorian high street of terraced houses and small shops. It was built in 1879 by William Abbott, a successful stockbroker. According to the Survey of London it was his “humorous caprice” to call it the Abbey. But the idea fits in with other medieval style creations of the time such as William Burges’s Tower House in nearby Melbury Road. He carved out a small estate from his property and the gardens of some other houses to the north.

Abbott unfortunately died of apoplexy in 1888 so he didn’t have much time to enjoy his creation. But we can see something of the sumptuous interiors in a set of photographs taken in 1924.

This is the entrance hall. It looks ready for some of the party goers we saw in fancy dress in the post about the Duchess of Devonshire’s Costume Ball (see link opposite) There was a great interest in Arthurian stories and imagery in the second half of the 19^th century. The Pre-Raphaelites loved medieval themes, William Morris was writing poetry in that vein, and Tennyson was writing Idylls of the King.

But these photos were taken years after Abbott’s death and the owners were clearly more concerned with making the Abbey into a comfortable home. The pre-occupation with myths and legends was probably irrelevant to these inhabitants. The ball room:

The boudoir with its over-stuffed armchair and sofa. No shortage of light on a sunny afternoon to dispel the gothic overtones of the arched window.

A bedroom, looking a bit bare. Maybe a guest room. Ready for occupation if you fancy a country house weekend without leaving London.

The day nursery. Look at the soft toy – a dog I think, the large tin car, the ship and is that an airship between them? Surely not.

Another bedroom. This one looks a bit more lived in, with the rug by the fire, the statuette of a dancer on the fireplace and the weird looking cushion on the sofa.

The Abbey retained its forbidding exterior and continued to look a bit like a castle or a medieval town house but inside there were probably no ghosts of women in black or men in armour to disturb the affluent inhabitants. The interior looks more suitable for a P G Wodehouse comedy. Or if you had to have something supernatural a ghost story written by Noel Coward.

Who knows what might have happened to the Abbey in later years had it survived. What did happen was what the North Kensington diarist Vere Hodgson called “a fiendish raid” in April 1941. Considerable damage was done in Campden Hill Road. A German bomber was brought down and crashed into a roof. The crew bailed out and were captured. The next day troops were guarding the pieces of the aircraft.

And that was it for the Abbey. It entered another stage of its gothic existence. It became a picturesque ruin with an overgrown and ruined garden.

From William Morris (romantic medieval socialism) to William Hope Hodgson (the horror of desolate places) in one swift move.

The comfortable rooms are emptied except for shadows, broken glass and shattered masonry.

The site was cleared in the late forties and remained derelict. The grounds Abbott had created became a muddy car park for a while. The Council acquired the site and eventually owned the whole block between Phillimore Walk, Holland Street, Campden Hill Road and Hornton Street. In 1959 they built the Kensington Central Library, a distinctly 20^thcentury building, where I now sit writing this post on the first floor. If I projected myself back eighty something years would I be in this room, sinking into the sofa and looking over at the statuette?

So it’s always worth asking that question, what was here before? Sometimes the answer is surprising.

Down at the World’s End

There is more than one World’s End. As a name for inns and taverns it seems to have emerged in the reign of Charles II and been used in other parts of London and elsewhere in the British Isles.  But the Chelsea World’s End tavern which gave its name to the area around it has been on local maps since there have been maps of Chelsea. The narrow alley which ran down diagonally to the river has been called Hobs Lane and World’s End Passage. This route was important as many of the tavern’s customers came by boat from London to enjoy its gardens and its hospitality. It is mentioned in Congreve’s play Love for Lover in 1695.

The surrounding area was farmland and nurseries in those days. The tavern was an island of leisure and a safe haven for travellers. (The water route was preferred – the area called the Five Fields between Chelsea and Knightsbridge was notorious for street robbery) By 1836 there were houses along World’s End Place and new streets nearby, Lackland Place and Riley Street. To the south west Baron de Berenger had started his National Sporting Club in the grounds of Cremorne House. Thirty years later at the time of the first Ordnance Survey map there were houses around the tavern and the Sporting Club had become the Cremorne pleasure gardens. By 1894 the Pleasure Gardens had gone and a network of streets had grown up to the south of the tavern – Blantyre Street, Vicat Street, Raasay Street, Dartrey Road, Bifron Street, Luna Street and Seaton Street all clustered in the triangle between the King’s Road and Cremorne Road.

Here is the tavern in the early 20^th century:

 

And here is a view from the 1930s looking south with St John’s church on the left and the chimneys of Lots Road power station in the distance:

 

 

Hardly any of those street names are familiar today because the streets themselves are gone, all demolished to build the World’s End Estate which now covers the entire area. Work began building the estate in 1969 and by 1975 tenants had begun moving into what was then the largest Council housing estate in Europe.

For the purpose of this post everything I’ve written so far is a preamble to the photographs which follow which show some of those gone but not forgotten streets just at the point when demolition had begun. Here is a view showing the same block of shops in Dartrey Terrace in 1969:

The former Home and Colonial store has become the home of the famous counter-cultural emporium Gandalf’s Garden.

At the same date demolition was well under way in Dartrey Road:

The Chelsea Flower Mill is visible at the rear of the picture and if I’m not mistaken Lots Road Power Station has lost at least one chimney. (The chimneys of Lots Road are probably a story in themselves.)

In another view of Dartrey Road children are playing near the now empty houses:

But in two streets east in Luna Street normal life proceeds:

At the end of the street the Battersea  side of the river is just visible.

The final photo below also of Luna Street shows a woman looking out of an upstairs window. Thanks to an enquiry from one of our customers I know her name and that the van in the picture was her husband’s. This is one way of reminding us that the pictures of old buildings which are part of my stock in trade are important, but what truly makes history live is the people inside the buildings.

(While I was selecting pictures for this post I noticed that boy on the bike who got himself into several pictures the photographer took that day.)

The title of this post comes from the theme song to BBC2’s short lived 1980s Chelsea soap opera World’s End. It centred on a pub called the World’s End but was actually filmed at the Cross Keys in Lawrence Street. Anyone remember it?

Gigantic: the Earl’s Court Wheel

If you’ve ever been to Vienna you might have seen the Wiener Riesenrad. Or if you’ve seen the film the Third Man you’ll remember Orson Welles famous speech: “in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock”  which he delivers while he and Joseph Cotten are riding one of the compartments in the Riesenrad. Constructed in 1897 and miraculously still surviving despite wartime damage and attempts to demolish it the Riesenrad is one of the oldest examples of a Ferris Wheel. The original Ferris Wheel designed by a naval engineer called William Graydon was built for the Chicago Exhibition in 1893. (It was taken apart and reassembled twice in its lifetime the last being at the World’s Fair in St Louis, another film connection although it doesn’t appear in Take me to St Louis.) The European rights to the patent were acquired by Walter Bassett another ex-navy man who was the director of a UK engineering company. It was Bassett’s company that built the Riesenrad and other versions of the Ferris Wheel in Paris, Blackpool and of course Earl’s Court.

The Great Wheel (also called the Big Wheel and my favourite the Gigantic Wheel) was constructed at the Earls Court Exhibition.

The Exhibition grounds had been squeezed onto surplus railways lands west of Warwick Road. They opened in 1887. One of the first attractions was William Cody’s Buffalo Bill Rough Riders and Redskin Show. There were also “national” exhibitions – French, German and Italian – a concert hall and a switchback railway. The spectacles became increasingly ambitious under the new proprietor Imre Kiralfy who rebuilt most of the buildings on the site. It was he who brought in Walter Bassett to create the Earls Court Great Wheel. Construction began in 1894.

 Here is the Great Wheel going up:

The Wheel was open for passengers in July 1895. It was 300 feet in diameter weighed 1100 tons and was propelled by two steam engines. A complete revolution took about 20 minutes.

Here is the Wheel in action seen from the Exhibition grounds:

And here is the view from the railway:

The oddest views are the ones showing the Wheel towering above nearby streets such as this one:

The excitement generated by the Wheel seems to almost exactly like the feelings we had about the London Eye. There is something about the concept of riding high into the air in a closed compartment suddenly seeing the familiar city from a new angle which transcends the barriers of time which separate us from the pleasure seekers of the late 19^th century. The Wheel had its detractors who thought it “vulgar”, “foolish” or “insane”. So not much change there. It ran successfully for several years. (There was one incident when the Wheel got stuck for a few hours but the passengers were compensated and came away happy.)

Like many such attractions the Wheel had a limited lifespan. Bassett was brought back to demolish it in 1906-7.

Here it is going down:

The Earls Court exhibition site has been re-modelled and rebuilt several times since the demise of the Great Wheel and a new development is being planned at the moment.  But wouldn’t it be good if the Great Wheel had survived like the Riesenrad and the London Eye had a slightly battered older cousin waving at it from the west of London?

The famous fish shop

Philip Norman’s 1905 book “London vanished and vanishing” describes a “quaint building…four doors west of a tavern called the Rising Sun”.  It was Maunder’s fish shop and its address was 72 Cheyne Walk according to the 1889 edition of Kelly’s Chelsea Directory. The shop had been demolished by the time of Norman’s book but he had painted it.

The interesting thing for me is that he wasn’t the only one, and Elizabeth Maunder’s modest establishment was painted, sketched, etched and photographed in its time. Here is a painting by Alice Boyd:

Here is a drawing by Percy Thomas:

And here is an etching by William Burgess from his collection “Bits of Old Chelsea”:

Burgess was a talented engraver and watercolourist who created many images of Chelsea. I’ll devote a whole post to him sometime soon; this picture has one of his characteristic touches which I will explain then. See if you can guess what I mean. Finally here is a photograph of the building just before its sale and demolition.

I can’t say why all these artists felt compelled to depict Mrs Maunder’s shop. Why are certain places recorded for us while others are lost and forgotten – vanished as Philip Norman puts it? One thing is sure, that none of these images could have been created until the artists had the space to step back from the shop, which they wouldn’t have had until the creation of Chelsea Embankment. Before Maunder’s had a address in Cheyne Walk it was located in Lombard Street one of a pair of streets between Beaufort Place and Cheyne Walk (the other was Duke Street) both of which were partly demolished to make way for the Embankment. This small stretch of riverside Chelsea has been recorded in numerous formats. On the river side was the rear of several buildings including the Adam and Eve tavern shown here in a photograph by James Hedderly but also depicted by Burgess and other local artist including Walter Greaves. (We’ll come back to him at a later date)

On the land side were the two narrow streets of shops and taverns. This view is east to west with Beaufort Place, now Beaufort Street just visible in the distance.

From the other direction the streets look like this:

You can see Arch House at the end creating a narrow tunnel which leads to Cheyne Walk. And if you look carefully at the buildings on the left you can just about make out the fish shop again.

I can’t tell you anything about Mrs Elizabeth Maunder. Trading fish before refrigeration must have been a little unpleasant for the shopkeeper and the customer but you have to think it was a popular shop for a while at least, and Mrs Maunder must have had a tolerant disposition to put up with all those artists forever drawing or painting.  If we could get the Local Studies Time Machine going she’d probably be pleased to see us. Lombard Street / Duke Street is one of those forgotten streets I would have like to walk down.

Mrs Maunder’s shop was demolished in 1892 but lives on, possibly the most depicted shop in Chelsea.

I know some of you like me appreciate the facilty to zoom in on the details of old photographs so here is a close-up of Duke Street looking west. Although the image is blurred you can still make out some interesting features.

The lost department store

The great days of the department store are probably over. There are survivors including two of the best known, Harrods in Kensington and Peter Jones in Chelsea. But the time when every city and every large London suburb had its own individual department store is gone.

The old names are not forgotten. In Kensington High Street the two great buildings which were home to the two department stores Barker’s and Derry and Tom’s are still there. The Barker’s building has a number of retail businesses and is also home to Associated Newspapers. The Derry and Toms building contains three separate stores and of course the Roof Garden is still a going concern. The Roof Garden deserves a post of its own and we’ll come back to it at a later point.

But I remember a third store on Kensington High Street as I’m sure many others will. I was dragged through all three of them by my parents at some point in the late 1960s. I remember the roof garden of course, a pushy salesman trying to foist a nasty pullover on me (my mother resisted all his efforts) and a fascinating vacuum tube payment system which sucked your money away at an alarming speed and returned your change just as quickly. That happened I think in the third of the great stores of Kensington High Street – Ponting’s.

Here are two photos from 1971 of the arcade which leads to Kensington High Street tube showing on one side an entrance to Derry and Tom’s (now the side entrance to Marks and Spencer) and on the other the display windows of Ponting’s.

As you can see, the Grand Removal Sale has already begun.  So what did Ponting’s look  like? This photo is from the 1950s.

The “House for Value” was located on the corner of Wright’s Lane. Twenty or so years later the sign is still in place but the closing down sale is on.

Note the sign for the roof garden in the top left of the picture.

Inside Ponting’s everything was for sale.

Some departments were busier than others.

By this point the House of Fraser owned all three stores. The John Barker Company had acquired Ponting’s in 1907 and Derry and Tom’s in 1920. It was they who built the architecturally demanding Derry and Tom’s building (1929-31, with the Roof Garden being completed in 1938) along with their own flagship building (1936 -1958 work being interrupted by the war). Ponting’s also had many improvements and some expansion but was never quite as prestigious as its two neighbours. It was the first to go, a victim of House of Fraser’s rationalisation programme in 1970. Derry and Tom’s followed shortly afterwards in 1973 but the building remains. After a short spell as the Kensington Super Store the Ponting’s main building was redeveloped in 1976-78.  The only section remaining is the building around the station arcade where La Senza and Accessorize are currently located. (Ironically it was the expense of developing the western side of the arcade which took the original business into liquidation.)

When I first started working in Kensington High Street I had to do some research to even work out where it had been. But although it is now lost many still remember the golden age of shopping on Kensington High Street.  Here is a Ponting’s invoice from 1930:

And finally an image of Pontings from an even earlier time, an interior from 1913 when retail therapy as we know it was still in its infancy.

Next week I’ll be doing another vanished shop, but quite a different one from Ponting’s.