Redherring, Old Brompton Rd, South Kensington, Kensington & Chelsea, 1988 88-4q-52
Red Herring had a shop for some years at 6 Old Brompton Road, more or less opposite South Kensington Station, which has now for some years been an opticians. They sold trendy casual clothes for women including shoes and bags. The poster at left in Arabic I think reflects the Iranian presence in the area.
Old Brompton Rd, South Kensington, Kensington & Chelsea, 1988 88-4q-53
The Brompton Hotel is still there at 30 Old Brompton Road, getting rather mixed review which perhaps reflect its 3* status and rather cheap rates for London. You can no longer go in and swear an oath at Lawrence Bloomfield, though the curious short pillar is still there. The Punch wine bar has last its superstructure, though the low wall at the bottom remains and there is still a popular bar area, but now steps lead down to a steak restaurant.
I couldn’t resist another picture of the Imperial Hotel on the corner of Queen’s Gate and Harrington Rd, demolished in 1992 and since then a cleared site used as a car park. In an earlier post I mentioned that planning permission had been granted in 1975 for the erection behind this facade of a cultural centre for the Islamic Republic of Iran and twenty self-contained flats, and later by Kensington and Chelsea for the use of the cleared site as a car park pending the building of this.
Shop, Harrington Rd, South Kensington, Kensington & Chelsea, 1988 88-4q-63
There was a crude simplicity about this mosaic of a bottle advertising the off-licence to its left that attracted my attention.
The Institut français du Royaume-Uni was begun in 1910 by Marie d’Orliac to introduce Londoners to well-known French writers, thinkers and artists. This building in Queensbury Place by architect Patrice Bonnet (1979-1964) in an art deco style was opened in 1939. Along the top of the facade are an olive branch, a cockerel, an asp and an owl, symbolising peace, courage, knowledge and wisdom. The Grade II listing text attributes the building to A J Thomas, a former assistant of Edwin L Lutyens and the architect of St Pancras Town Hall.
Bray Place is a short street a little to the north and parallel to the King’s Road in Chelsea presumably named for Sir Reginald Bray who owned the manor at the time of Henry VII. This house with its two round windows is on the corner with Draycott Ave.
Mr Brunello is no longer here, and the shop is now a hairdresser, on the corner opposite the previous image at 3 Bray Place. The view is looking down Draycott Ave to the houses on Coulson St, and above them the tall block of flats, Whitelands House, a 10 storey block of flats dating from 1935-7 above the shops in the Kings Road by Frank Verity & Sam Beverley.
I can tell you nothing about this small half-timbered house on Draycott Avenue, which I suspect is considerably more modern than it looks. At a glance the tiles and windows look remarkably ancient, and the beams have something of the character found in genuinely old buildings. Perhaps someone reading this will know more and comment.
Click on any of the above images to go to a larger version in the album 1988 London Photos from where you can browse through other pictures that I made in that year in London.
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
Dora House, Sculptors, sculpture, Old Brompton Rd, South Kensington, Kensington & Chelsea, 1988 88-4p-36
Dora House at 108-10 Old Brompton Road was originally built in 1820 by builder William Blake as 7 & 8 Gloucester Terrace, but they were considerably adapted and the frontage here and in the next picture dates from 1885-86, when the house became the studios of portrait photographers Elliot and Fry of Baker St. The firm employed a number of photographers and as well as Baker St (which they left in 1919) had several other studios and a printing works in Barnet. Many of their early negatives were destroyed by bombing in the second World War, and the rest are now held by the National Portrait Gallery. They photographed many of the leading personalities of the Victorian era.
Dora House, Sculptors, sculpture, Old Brompton Rd, South Kensington, Kensington & Chelsea, 1988 88-4p-36
Stonework on the new frontage was carved by John McCulloch, wrought iron by Alfred A. Newman and the architect was William Flockhart. The building is Grade II listed. The house was leased and later bought by sculptor Cecil Walter Thomas in 1919 and later he set up the Dora Charitable Trust, named after his late wife, to make the house available to the Royal British Society of Sculptors after his death. They have occupied it as a studio museum since 1979, opening it to the public with family activities and temporary exhibitions.
Clareville St, South Kensington, Kensington & Chelsea, 1988 88-4p-22
Clareville St, off the Gloucester Rd and the Old Brompton Road, was developed after 1820 when the landowner, Catherine Lee let the ground to William Blake of Pear Tree Lodge, Little Chelsea, a builder and bricklayer, on a 99 year lease to build houses that at least met the London Building Act of 1774 for ‘fourth-rate’ houses.
Along the two main roads, Blake built rather larger houses – including what is now Dora House, but in the two back streets there were smaller houses to varied designs, including detached villas and terraces. As the Survey of London says, these “gave the estate a distinctly intimate character which it still retains, despite much subsequent rebuilding and infilling.”
Clareville St, South Kensington, Kensington & Chelsea, 1988 88-4p-23
When built the streets here were named Gloucester Grove, Gloucester Grove East and Gloucester Grove West, but were later renamed Clareville Grove and Clareville Street after Clareville Cottage which was a short distance further west outside this estate.
If you go to see the Imperial Hotel on the corner of Harrington Road now all you will find is an empty plot surrounded by fences and used as a car park. The demolition of the hotel was completed in 1992 after the borough of Kensington & Chelsea had granted planing permission for this use “pending redevelopment.” Permission for the redevelopmentof this listed building, I think a part of the Harrington estate and dating from the 1860s, had been granted by the GLC in 1975 for the provision of a new cultural centre for the Islamic Republic of Iran and twenty self-contained flats but with the development to be behind the existing facade. I don’t know whether later planning permission allowed full demolition or whether this was carried out illegally.
No development has taken place on this very expensive piece of land since, and I wonder if it is still owned by Iran but sanctions against that country have prevented any building. The hotel was better known in earlier years for its basement club Blaises, a music venue where among others The Byrds, John Lee Hooker, Ike & Tina Turner, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry, Pink Floyd, Bo Diddley, Gladys Knight & The Pips, Captain Beefhear and The Pretty Things played.
St Augustine’s Church, Queens Gate, South Kensington, Kensington & Chelsea, 1988 88-4p-26
The demolition of the Imperial Hotel next door to St Augustine’s Church means we can now see the north side of the church; when I made this picture only its frontage was visible from Queen’s Gate. This II* listed building is said to be the second-best surviving church by William Butterfield; it opened for worship in 1871, but was only completed in 1876. The listing text is brief, probably because it was listed in 1949, but mentions its yellow brick with red and black bricks and stone as well as the Gothic western bellcote with flanking pinnacles.
The building replaced an earlier temporary iron church built in the garden of its priest in Gloucester Road in 1865, where services were said to be “Popery itself under the thinnest guise of the Protestant name” (Wikipedia.) Plans to build a larger replacement were blocked for some years by the Bishop of London, probably because of this extreme Anglo-Catholicism, but also because there were already plenty of churches in the area already, and the building could only begin after he moved away to become Archibishop of Canterbury. The listing text and some other sources wrongly give the date of the church as 1865.
Roland Gardens, South Kensington, Kensington & Chelsea, 1988 88-4p-53
In the 1890s this house at 43 Roland Gardents was the home of Mrs Ada Freeman Gell, (aka Mrs Newman Gell, Miss Ada Evershed) (1849-1929) a solicitor’s daughter from Brighton who became an artist who apparently exhibited both sculpture and paintings from around 1888-1898. Several of her sculptures are in the Brighton Art Gallery though I think not on public display.
The development of the site was diverted in the 1970s by the craze for roller-skating and an open-air rink was opened on a large site here in 1876 and soon covered over to enable all-weather skating. In 1889 the site was sold to the firm of Aldin and Plater who had developed other houses in the road. They obtained a licence from the London County Council to build “private Studios for Painters” and sold the site on to a local builder who completed Nos 43 and 45 in 1891-2.
This graffiti was on a large and rather dirty stone-faced wall, on Cranley Mews, on the section of the street leading down from Cranley Gardens to the main mews street behind the houses. The wall on the side of 54 Cranley Gardens was repainted in 2014 and the cracks no longer show, but there was no trace of the graffiti remaining before that. The rather utilitarian light fitting was replace some years earlier by a more ornate lantern on a fancy iron bracket. But no, I didn’t think it was art, though I have seen some even sillier things that were accepted as such.
Click on any of the images to go to the album where you can see large images and browse others on-line in 1988 London Photos.
