National Anti-Fur March: The march on began with a short rally in Belgrave Square before moving off to protest outside many of the luxury shops in the area that still sell fur products, including Harrods.
Protests like this one organised by the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade (CAFT) had played an important part in making the public aware of the terrible cruelty to animals taking place in fur farms which led to fur farming being made illegal in the UK in 2001.
But it remains legal to sell fur in the UK – so supporting the cruelty in fur farms overseas. And the protesters demonstrated at many of the best known names in exxpensive fashion – including Armani, Gucci, Fendi, Joseph, Prada, Versace, Gianfranco Ferre, Dolce and Gabbana, Christian Dior, Roberto Cavalli and Nicole Farhi in Sloane St, and Burberry and Harrods in Brompton Road still selling fur products.
It seems only logical that when the government passed the law banning fur farming they should also have banned the sale of fur.
But perhaps a significant reason for not doing so was the fact that fur is still used in some military uniforms, notably the bearskins worn by the guards. Worn at ceremonial events including the changing of the guards in London and Windsor, these stupidly large headdresses each requires the killing of a black bear in licensed hunts in Canada and cost over £2,000 each. They could be replaced by false fur at a hugely lower cost.
Many leading figures including the former and current Queen have announced they will not buy fur, but others among the uncaring rich continue to do so.
According to PETA, in a 2020 “YouGov opinion poll commissioned by animal protection charity Humane Society International/UK… Only 3% said they would wear the cruelly obtained material.“
They say “Designers such as Calvin Klein, Stella McCartney, Vivienne Westwood, and Tommy Hilfiger have pledged never to use fur in their collections. The majority of high-street and online stores – including Topshop, AllSaints, and ASOS – are also fur-free.“
Others to have recently made the change to faux fur in their collections “include Saint Laurent, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, Versace, Coach, and Prada” and “in 2018, London Fashion Week became the first major fashion week not to show any fur on its catwalk” according to an Independent article.
But among those still selling fur, still part of the truly horrific trade, are “Dior, Louis Vuitton, Fendi, Max Mara, Harrods, Alberta Ferreti, Carolina Herrera, Roberto Cavalli.“
You can read a long account of the protest and see many more pictures from the event on My London Diary at National Anti-fur March.
I perhaps need an eye test, as when I was captioning this picture to go onto Flickr I called it ‘Four Eyes’, a term of abuse for schoolboy spectacle wearers. But perhaps I was referring to the door at left which has very much a face on it with the two circular panels and a letter box and a know for the nose, panels of facial hair on each side and a lower letter box for a mouth, along with the cut-off face of a man walking into the picture at extreme left.
Or perhaps I just thought ‘Four Eyes’ was a better name for an opticians rather than the prosaic ‘For Eyes’. The shop at 136 Sloane St is long gone, though the building remains and this is now a part of a wider shopfront.
The term ‘corner shop’ conjures up something far to plebian for this location, though this is one of a pair of them on the junction of Cadogan St and Halsey St. One is now an Estate Agents and this one an office for a company advising wealthy clients on their investments.
Cadogan Gardens, originally Leete St, a part of the Cadogan Estate was rebuilt in 1887 in a Queen Anne Rivival style. No 20 apparently dates from 1891 and was built by Henry John Wright who also built some other houses on Lord Cadogan’s estate. The previously rather poor area was one of speculative building for the growing upper middle classes who often had large families – there were no reliable or widely used methods of contraception and women who survived childbirth continued to produce children until menopause. The house was converted into flats in the 1950s.
Donne Place, Brompton, Kensington & Chelsea, 1988 88-4m-31
Donne Place is a “mews Style cul-de-sac with pedestrian through road”, off Draycott Avenue in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The houses were built in the mid 19th century in what was then a poor area and the street was then known as Caroline Place. Other streets in the area have also changed names and when built it was a street off what had been Blacklands Lane, was then Marlborough Road and is now Draycott Avenue. Although sometimes described by estate agents as a mews, the forty or so houses were built as small family homes around the middle of the nineteenth century, along with other similar streets in the area. At the end of the street is the large block of Marlborough Buildings, two large blocks opened in 1890 by the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company to house 500 people.
A high-explosive bomb destroyed some of the area in 1940-41, and some properties and I think part or all of this one, at the corner with Bulls Gardens, a slightly earlier development, is probably one of these. Many of those in the street have been extensively rebuilt behind their facades (and in some cases below ground) in more recent years. Houses built as simple dwellings for the better-off working classes now sell for £2-3million.
I think this building was probably at 163 Draycott Avenue, and though still standing, its frontage has been altered beyound recognition, with no trace of their the Draycott Gallery, Manguette or the subterranean L’escapade.
10 Milner Street still looks much the same apart from a coat of paint and a new front door, and is still next to the entrance to St Catherine’s Mews, now with a less attractive gate that no longer matches the balcony. The shop at right is still an estate agent, but has changed from Lloyds to Stanley.
The house, often known as Stanley House, is Grade II listed as a substantial early mid-19th century house. It was built in 1855 by “Chelsea speculator John Dodd” as his Chelsea Home according to Wikipedia and the many web sites who have copied this information. I think this may be John Todd (1817-1897), the son of George Todd & Ann Beecroft of Durham who were married in 1815 at Bishop Wearmouth, Durham, England and is said to have moved to Middlesex where he became an builder and became rather rich.
And these are the doors no longer present on 10 Milner St. The house became the home of famous horologist Courtenay Ilbert and housed his collection of clocks, watches, marine chronometers and sundials. His nephew, Michael Inchbald lived with him from 1945 and after his death refurbished the interiors in a manner that established his reputation as an interior designer. Inchbald’s then wife Jacqueline Ann Duncan founded the Inchbald School of Design, the first interior design school in Europe, in their family home in 1960. (Thanks again Wikipedia and their link to Christies.) It is still going strong but now at 7 Eaton Gate, where somewhere inside they possibly still have these doors.
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.
Chesham House was the Russian Embassy in London from 1853 until 1927, when we ceased to have a Russian Embassy after the foundation of the USSR. Now it hides away in Kensington Palace Gardens. The area was developed in the 1830s on land where leases had been obtained a century earlier by the Whig politician William Lowndes (1652–1724) who acquired the manor of Chesham Bury in Hertfordshire in 1687 and rebuilt the original Bury and manor house of Great Chesham in 1712.
In 2007 a large family flat occupying the third floor of this building was featured by Forbes in a listing of London’s Most Expensive Flats – at the time it was valued at a mere £17.5 million. Lowndes is said to be the origin of the phrase “Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves” and that is an awful number of pence.
3 Hans Crescent, Knightsbridge, Kensington & Chelsea, 1988 88-3e-36
You can see the rear of Harrods at the right hand edge of this picture. This area was rebuilt completely between around 1890 and 1910, partly becuase of the huge expansion of Harrods and is in a vaguely Queen Anne style. This building has become very familiar to me in more recent years as the home of the embassies of both Colombia and Ecuador, each with a small suite of rooms in a rather impressive building and sharing the entrance with the other occupants.
It was of course from June 2012 to 11 April 2019 the temporary home of Julian Assange, at first granted asylum by Ecuador and then, after a change of government, handed over to the British police and since kept in solitary confinement by the British establishment who clearly hoped he would die in Belmarsh prison. Keeping a police guard outside this building to prevent Assange’s escape cost us a totally unnecessary £12.6 million.
Chelsea House, Lowndes St, Belgravia, Kensington & Chelsea, 1988 88-3e-42
Chelsea House, a tall, curved block on the corner of Lowndes St and Cadogan Place, has around ten residental floors above this street entrance and the luxury shops of its ground floor. There is a second entrance like this around the corner in Lowndes St, and both look to me rather as posh noses stuck on to a rather more utilitarian facade. Above the 7th floor the upper reaches are set back in a largely unsuccessful attempt to disguise the height of the builsing.
Sloane St is full of shops seliing expensive clothes to those who think labels are more important than utility, and some seem rather ridiculously styled.
The Danish embassy at left was one of very few modern buildings of distinction in the area and designed by the famous Danish architect Arne Jacobsen, and completed by his practice after his death. It was commisioned in 1969 and existing buildings were demolishes, but the Danes ran out of cash and for four years the site was a car park. Work began again and the foundation stone was laid in 1975 with the building – with added security measure included after the beginning of the IRA attacks was completed in 1977. To its right is a dental practice and then the Peruvian Embassy and another building with adjacent doors.
The Jeeves Ladies, Kate McGill, Pont St, Belgravia, Kensington & Chelsea, 1988 88-3e-46
There is still a Jeeves Dry Cleaners in Pont St, on the corner of Cadogan Lane, but its facade no longer displays the once well-known logo designed for them by Derrick Holmes. The statue by Irish Sculptor Kate McGill was commissioned by Sydney Jacob, who in 1969 founded Jeeves of Belgravia with David Sandeluss. Seven foot tall and weighing around a ton, it appeared on the street overnight in 1974 and is still there, outside a smaller shop on the opposite side of the road and rather obscured by fenced brick boxes around each of a short row of trees.
Clicking on any of the above images will take you to a larger version in my Flickr Album 1988 London Photos, where you can browse forward or back through the pictures in the album.
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.
St Georges Hospital, Royal Artillery, Memorial, Hyde Park Corner, Westminster, 1988 88-3d-22
I can’t recall why on this particular March Day in 1988 I decided to photograph these major military meorials at Hyde Park Corner. I think I’d probably emerged from the tube there, or perhaps got off a bus from Victoria Station and thought the lighting looked right. Non-photographers often see me going out on bright sunny days with a blue sky and no trace of cloud and say to me “Good weather for it!” and I usually just give a faint smile, while thinking to myself it might have been better to have left the cameras at home. For subjects like these, a bright overcast day with no shadows is generally the best, enabling you to chose your viewpoint to bring out the best in your subject.
Machine Gun Corps, Memorial, Hyde Park Corner, Westminster, 1988 88-3d-43
St George’s Hospital is a good backdrop for the . The hospital opened next door in 1733 and was expanded with this building in 1830, to provide 300 beds. Its medical school moved to Tooting in1970 and the hospital finally closed here in 1980. Part had clearly moved much earlier and the Nightingale Ward in which I stayed for a couple of weeks at St George’s in 2003 were clearly from the 19th century and falling to pieces. The Grade I listed Royal Artillery Memorial designed by Charles Sargeant Jagger, with architectural work by Lionel Pearson, was unveiled in 1925, to commemorate the 49,076 soldiers from the Royal Artillery killed in the First World War and to my mind is the finest sculptural piece of the several around.
The Machine Gun Corps Memorial was also erected in 1925, but rather further to the south in Grosvenor Place. It was dismantled to enlarge the roudabout in 1945 and only replace in its current position at the north of the isolated square in 1963, By Derwent Wood, it shows David holding Goliath’s sword and at a lower lever are two real Vickers machine guns covered with bronze and with laurel wreathes. The Grade I-listed triumphal arch by Decimus Burton was built nearby in 1826-30 to celebrate the victory over the French and moved to its curent location in 1882-3. At the same time a huge and ugly equestrian statue of Wellington which had been placed on top in 1846 was removed and sent to Aldershot, being replace by the more fitting Quadriga by Captain Adrian Jones. Until 1992 the arch was home to London’s smallest police station but it now houses an exhibition about Waterloo.
When the eyesore huge Wellington statue was taken from the top of the arch to Aldershot, Joseph Boehm was commisioned to make a replacement, which was installed on a plinth facing the Duke of Wellington’s house, Apsley House, at Hyde Park Corner. Below on the four corners of the plinth stand four foot-soldiers, one from each of the four nations of the united kingdom.
Hans Crescent, Knightsbridge, Westminster, 1988 88-3e-22
Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge is a little to the west of Hyde Park Corner, between the back of Harrods and Sloane St. Part of the Cadogan Estate, this building at 2-4 Hans Crscent on the corner of Pavilion Road stands out in the area both for its white finish – and is know at the White House among so much red brick and is home to the Holy Carrot vegan restaurant, described by some as London’s best vegan restuarant and also to Urban Reatreat, “a one stop shop for all things to do with beauty” also with a restuarant but not vegan who are responsible for a large pink and gold plastic creature on its balcony.
Edward Walford in his contribution ‘The western suburbs: Belgravia’, to Old and New London: Volume 5 (London, 1878), pp. 1-14. has a lengthy description of Belgravia, much a which is still relevant today. You can read it in full at British History Online but the rest of today’s text come from this volume:
This mine of wealth—the present suburb, or rather city, of Belgravia, for such it has become—passed into the possession of the Grosvenor family in 1656, when the daughter and sole heiress of Alexander Davies, Esq., of Ebury Farm, married Sir Thomas Grosvenor, the ancestor of the present Duke of Westminster. This Mr. Davies died in 1663, three years after the Restoration, little conscious of the future value of his five pasturing fields.
Edward Walford, ‘The western suburbs: Belgravia’, in Old and New London: Volume 5 (London, 1878), pp. 1-14. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol5/pp1-14
“In Queen Elizabeth’s time,” observes a writer in the Belgravia magazine, “this sumptuous property was only plain Eabury, or Ebury Farm, a plot of 430 acres, meadow and pasture, let on lease to a troublesome ‘untoward’ person named Wharle; and he, to her farthingaled Majesty’s infinite annoyance, had let out the same to various other scurvy fellows, who insisted on enclosing the arable land, driving out the ploughs, and laying down grass, to the hindrance of all pleasant hawking and coursing parties. Nor was this all the large-hearted queen alone cared about; she had a feeling for the poor, and she saw how these enclosures were just so much sheer stark robbery of the poor man’s right of common after Lammas-tide. In the Regency, when Belgrave Square was a ground for hanging out clothes, all the space between Westminster and Vauxhall Bridge was known as ‘Tothill Fields,’ or ‘The Downs.’ It was a dreary tract of stunted, dusty, trodden grass, beloved by bull-baiters, badger-drawers, and dog-fighters.
Edward Walford, ‘The western suburbs: Belgravia’, in Old and New London: Volume 5 (London, 1878), pp. 1-14. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol5/pp1-14
There can be little doubt that, in right of his Manor of Ebury, the Duke of Westminster enjoys one of the largest rent-rolls, if not the very largest, in the kingdom. The current rumour of the day sets it down at £1,000 a day, or £365,000 a year. Other noblemen, especially the Dukes of Sutherland, Buccleuch, and Northumberland, are thought to approach very nearly to a like rental.
Chester Square, which almost abuts upon the north side of Eaton Square, was commenced about the year 1840, and was so called after the City of Chester, near which place Eaton Hall is situated. The picturesque Gothic church of St. Michael, which stands in a commanding position at the western end of the square, was erected in 1844, the foundation-stone being laid by Earl Grosvenor, father of the present Duke of Westminster; and it was built from the designs of Mr. Thomas Cundy in the Decorated style of the fourteenth century. Its principal external feature is the tower, with a lofty spire, which, till some additions to the body of the church were made in 1874, appeared to be somewhat out of proportion to the remainder of the fabric.
Edward Walford, ‘The western suburbs: Belgravia’, in Old and New London: Volume 5 (London, 1878), pp. 1-14. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol5/pp1-14
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.
