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.

Ready for war – June 1939

It’s Monday 19^th June 1939.

Sir John Anderson and his colleagues have found a vantage point to watch an event of national significance. Down below something out of the ordinary is occurring.

Crowds are gathering to watch and to take  part.

Notices are posted.

A bunch of girls are getting out of school early.

Children of all ages are on their way somewhere.

Now they’re being organised and labelled. But this is not a real evacuation.

They’re being marched off again down the King’s Road. It’s all go.

This was an event for adults as well.

Buses had been hired for the day.

Casualties had been organised for the volunteer members of the emergency services.

It’s all an exercise of course at this stage. These casualties are only pretending.

Regional and national newspapers reported this event in some detail. According to the reports about 7,500 people took part in the biggest Air Raid Precautions test the country had ever seen. Children and adults marched to 125 shelters in the Chelsea area. Virtual shelters that is, chalked off areas to stand in and designated pubs. 400 wardens shepherded the crowds through the streets. 5000 children from 21 schools were taken to underground stations and then taken away again. Sirens were sounded for extra realism. As the streets were cleared “an unnatural silence fell” according to the Times, broken only by a loudspeaker announcement that the bombers were only seven or eight minutes away. A rocket was launched to give witnesses some idea of the noise of bombs falling. “A few idlers” refused to take shelter but at least kept still. Some flyers were distributed calling for real shelters to be built as opposed to the conceptual versions of this event. Buses, cars and taxis parked by the kerb. Some virtual bomb damage was made up for the purposes of the exercise and the casualties were escorted to the first aid post at Chelsea Library (In Manresa Road in those days). My colleagues at the library filled 5 small scrapbooks with cuttings from newspapers ranging from the Evening Standard to the Belfast Telegraph.

The people involved in the exercise are serious but not solemn.  People seem to be enjoying the event.

There’s very little sense of anxiety in these pictures.

From this distance in time I can’t get imagine what it was like for the people of London to be getting ready for a war which would be fought in their own city as well as in Europe. Did they know what was coming? Did they believe that the exercise of June 1939 was a realistic picture of what lay ahead?

The next picture is not of an exercise. It’s about a year later.

The men in the picture are not pretending to search for survivors.

Now go back to the picture of the woman putting up the sign. You’ll see her again wearing a coat and a helmet getting some instructions from a man not unlike Mr Lansdell, (he’s second from the left in the picture below). She might be on the far right of the group of women running. And she’s here on a roof in 1941. Now she’s an ARP warden in the real war.

Secrets of Avondale Park

Avondale Park is a pleasant but innocuous open space in North Kensington created in 1892 on the site of Adam’s brickfield one of the many light industrial sites in the area in the 19^th century. Today it combines sports facilities with a play area and formal gardens. But beneath it lies a big secret .Landscapers working on the site in 2009 investigating the roots of a large tree discovered a set of extensive underground passages. There were several theories of how old the passages were and what purpose they might have served but research by the Parks department in Council Records showed that the passages were an almost forgotten municipal air raid shelter constructed in 1939 and sealed in 1946.

It seemed odd that a shelter which would have held up to two hundred people could have been forgotten. When local people were asked about the shelter many did in fact remembered its existence but almost no-one suspected that it was still there. This may be an example of the strange fog of secrecy that existed in the war years. Today it is hard to keep secrets. Information gets out through news media and over the internet. We forget that in the Second World War it was not only public policy to keep secrets but a matter of survival for the general population as well as the government. Major local events such as the destruction of Sloane Square station went largely unreported and obituaries for people who died in air raids often said simply that the person had dies suddenly.  Perhaps this habit of secrecy persisted after the war and the existence of the Avondale Park shelter was gradually erased from public consciousness.

 During the exploration of the tunnels I got the chance to go down there myself and take a few photographs.

The walls of the shelter are concrete in some of the passages steel in others. In the picture below you can make out brackets near ground level where folding benches or beds might have been attached. The whole set of passages a rectangle bisected by a pair of middle passages seems large when you are wandering around it as I was with a group of less than a dozen people.

But imagine it filled with rows of people, just sitting together too close for comfort in the dimly lit passages, some talking quietly, some just listening for the sounds of aircraft and explosions, others just silently waiting for the all clear siren.

Imagine the sense of claustrophobia and apprehension as hours went by, punctuated by the sudden panic when an explosion was too loud or too close for comfort.

Shelters like this one were built in many parts of London where there was no space for individual Anderson shelters or there were no tube stations nearby. (The nearest Underground station would have been Holland Park, quite a distance if you needed to get to safety quickly) Several have survived so Avondale Park is not unique but it is unusual and worth preserving as an insight into life on the home front in World War 2. The Blitz is often associated at least in the popular imagination with east London but Kensington and Chelsea along with the rest of west London also suffered significant destruction and loss of life.

The shelter was cleared out completely in 1946. The toilets, furniture and lighting were removed. There is almost no sign of the many temporary inhabitants apart from this barely legible handwritten notice exhorting people not to spit and a faint drawing of an aeroplane.

But the shelter is quiet enough for you to imagine what it might have been like to spend hours underground uncertain of what you might find when you got out again. The shelter entrance has been closed until a final decision can be made about future use, possibly as an educational resource. The dark corridors are quiet again and remain as a hidden monument to the terrors of the Blitz.