CHAPTER IX
Princes Gate and Ennismore Gardens:
The Kingston House Estate
Extending over twenty-one acres, the Kingston House
estate was one of the largest property holdings in Knightsbridge. At its centre was Kingston House itself, built in
the mid-eighteenth century for the celebrated Elizabeth
Chudleigh, soi-disant Duchess of Kingston. Bounded
on three sides by fields, this mansion originally commanded uninterrupted views towards Surrey. Increasingly
encroached upon by building, it survived until the 1930s,
the last of the big houses of old Knightsbridge.
The development of the estate (figs 64, 82) took place in
stages between the 1840s and the 1960s. Of the four principal phases, only three are represented today by buildings
on the ground. The earliest, begun by one of the great Victorian speculative builders, John Elger, lasted almost a
decade, and saw the construction of two ranges of large
houses in Princes Gate, east and west of Kingston House,
and the lesser houses on the eastern side of Ennismore
Gardens. The other three sides of Ennismore Gardens
belong to the second wave of development, undertaken in
the late 1860s and early '70s by the contractors Peter and
Alexander Thorn.
A rather disjointed third phase, overlapping with the
second and continuing into the 1880s, produced a cluster
of large detached houses in the northern part of Ennismore
Gardens, on the eastern and southern fringes of Kingston
House garden. In the 1930s a protracted fourth phase
began. While preserving the leafy and spacious character
of the area, this swept away old Kingston House, the later
Victorian mansions to the south and east, and the early
Victorian eastern range of Princes Gate, replacing them
with a mix of apartment blocks and town-houses, the last of
which were not completed until the late 1960s.
Almost all of the mews houses associated with the two
earlier phases of development survive. Endlessly prettified,
they provide a picturesque counterpoint to the prevailing
gravitas, and occasional banality, of their neighbours. In
these surroundings, the Lombardic architecture of the former All Saints' Church (now a Russian Orthodox cathedral) strikes an unexpectedly exotic note.