CHAPTER III - The Pitt Estate
When first covered with speculative
housing on a large scale in the mid
nineteenth century, the Pitt estate (fig.
7) consisted of approximately sixteen acres of land
surrounding Campden House. Most of this
property had formed part of the large estate
attached to Campden House in the seventeenth
century and had been purchased by Stephen Pitt
in 1751, but a small piece of copyhold land (the
site of Bullingham Mansions) had been acquired
by the Pitt family through marriage.
In 1609 Sir Baptist Hicks, a wealthy mercer
much favoured by the King, was admitted as a
tenant of the manor of Abbots Kensington to a
capital messuage and two closes of land called The
Racks and King's Mead. (ref. 1) This holding formed
the heart of the Campden House estate (the
relationship between the 'capital messuage' and
Campden House itself is discussed on page 55)
and it appears that a substantial part of the estate
was originally copyhold land, although it must
have been enfranchised at an early date. In 1616
Hicks purchased some seventy acres to the south
and west of his original holding from Robert
Horseman for £2,679, (ref. 2) (fn. a) and at its greatest extent
in the first half of the seventeenth century the
Campden House estate must have consisted of
over one hundred acres.
In 1628 Hicks was created Viscount Campden,
deriving his title from the manor in Gloucestershire
which he also owned. As he had no male
heirs the title was granted with specific remainder
to his son-in-law Edward, Lord Noel. (ref. 3) His
estates also passed to the Noel family, but the
Dowager Viscountess Campden lived at Campden
House for several years after his death in 1629.
Both the second Viscount, who died in 1643, and
the third were active Royalists and the Campden
estates were confiscated during the Civil War.
They were restored to the third Viscount in 1647
on payment of a composition of £9,000. (ref. 4) At
this time the property in Kensington formed
only a small part of Viscount Campden's total
holdings, most of his estates being in Gloucestershire
and Rutland. (ref. 5)
Figure 7:
The Pitt estate. Based on the Ordnance Survey of 1894–6
In 1662 an Act of Parliament was passed
settling the Campden House estate on Viscount
Campden and his heirs, (ref. 6) but in 1708 the third
Earl of Gainsborough (fn. b) sold the estate, a further
Act having been obtained some time previously
to enable the property to be sold. The purchaser,
who paid £6,800, was Laud D'Oyley of St. Mary
le Savoy, a merchant. (ref. 7) D'Oyley, who died shortly
afterwards, left his property to his son Robert,
and in March 1709/10 Robert D'Oyley broke
up the estate when he sold Campden House and
about thirteen acres around the mansion to Robert
Balle, a merchant, for £2,550. In subsequent
transactions D'Oyley sold two more pieces of land
to make Balle's total holding some sixteen and a
half acres. (ref. 8) The remainder of the estate afterwards
descended to the Phillimore family (see
page 58).
Robert Balle did not retain the now much
truncated Campden House estate for long, for in
1719 he sold it for £4,000 to Nicholas Lechmere,
the attorney-general, who was later created Baron
Lechmere. In 1751 Edmund Lechmere, the
nephew and heir of Lord Lechmere, sold the
estate to Stephen Pitt for £2,800, and, with the
exception of some parts sold since, it has remained
in the ownership of the Pitt family. (ref. 9)
Stephen Pitt was the son of Samuel Pitt, a
merchant, whose family owned house property in
the City of London. His mother, Catherine, was
the daughter of Robert Orbell and had inherited
some copyhold land near Church Lane (now
Kensington Church Street) from her father, who
had erected five houses on the land at the end of
the seventeenth century. (ref. 10) These houses, which
were called Orbell's Buildings and later Pitt's
Buildings, were approached from a courtyard off
Church Lane and appear to have been ranged in
a north-south line. In later manorial documents
they number only four and by the mid nineteenth
century only two houses and their accompanying
buildings occupied the site. Even these two houses
were sometimes joined together to form one. (ref. 11)
The names given to these houses at this time were
Bullingham House (most confusingly, for a house
which had at one time borne that name was then
still standing on a nearby site in Kensington
Church Street) and Newton House (see fig. 7).
Bullingham House had its main front facing west
and from surviving illustrations of the façade
appears to have dated from the early to mid
eighteenth century, although only a refronting
may have taken place at this time. Newton House
appears to have been slightly older and it is
possible that it basically consisted of two or more
of Orbell's five houses joined together. It was
named after Sir Isaac Newton, who had lived at
Orbell's Buildings for the last two years of his
life. Traditionally, however, the claims of
Bullingham House as his place of residence and
death in 1727 have been more strongly advanced, (ref. 12)
but all that can be stated with certainty is that
Newton lived in one of the houses on Robert
Orbell's copyhold land. In 1894 the copyhold
was enfranchised and Bullingham House and
Newton House were demolished for the building
of Bullingham Mansions.
Stephen Pitt died in 1793 and the estate was
inherited by his son, also named Stephen. In 1814
this Stephen Pitt sold a narrow piece of land with
a short frontage to Kensington High Street to the
Vestry in order to provide additional burial
ground for St. Mary Abbots Church. This land,
which had formerly been occupied by the long
carriage-drive to Campden House from Kensington
High Street, was part of a field called Paramour's
Pingle—a name which might seem to
imply that it was a favourite place for clandestine
frolics in the hay, but was in fact more prosaically
derived from the name of a tenant,
Lawrence Paramour. The Vestry paid £2,100
for the land, which is now occupied by the former
Vestry Hall and the garden and playground to the
north of it (see page 37). (ref. 13)
There is evidence that Pitt contemplated some
building developments in the 1820's, for the
minutes of the Kensington Turnpike Trust for
1826 indicate that Joseph Kay, who was Pitt's
surveyor at the time, had entered into an agreement
with one Samuel Bickford for building along
part of the Kensington Church Street frontage.
No houses appear to have been built, however,
and it may be that the difficulties which beset the
building industry after 1825 prevented the completion
of the undertaking. (ref. 14)
From 1844 to 1864
The 1840's witnessed a general resurgence in
building activity in northern Kensington and the
Pitt estate was only one of several areas where
large-scale undertakings were begun in that
decade. In November 1844 Stephen Pitt entered
into an agreement with William Eales, a timber
merchant, and Jeremiah Little, a builder, both of
St. Marylebone, to develop practically the whole
of his estate. Only Newton House and Bullingham
House with their large gardens extending to
the west were excluded. Campden House and the
smaller mansion on its west side, Little Campden
House, were included in the area covered by the
agreement, and at one time their demolition was
contemplated. In the event they were left standing,
although with considerably reduced grounds.
The total area involved was approximately
fourteen and a half acres, which Eales and Little
agreed to take for a ninety-nine-year term at an
annual rent of £500 for the first four years and
£900 for the remainder. Over a six-year period
they were required to build houses to the value of
£10,000 (evidently calculated as a multiple of the
rack-rental values) and to spend £2,500 in making
roads, sewers and pavements. The building
materials to be used were specified and the builders
were enjoined to observe the provisions of the
1844 Building Act. All houses were to be erected
'under the inspection and to the satisfaction' of
Pitt's surveyor, and none were to be of less than
£30 annual value. Pitt agreed to grant leases of
the houses as soon as they had been covered-in to
the developers or their nominees, and undertook
that as soon as £900 had been secured in ground
rents (equivalent to approximately £63 per acre)
any further leases would be granted at ground
rents not exceeding five shillings. (ref. 10)
The surveyor to the Pitt estate was Thomas
Allason, and there is reason to believe that he had
a considerable influence on the type of development
undertaken by Eales and Little. The layout
adopted has no outstanding features but the area
was small and of awkward shape, while the street
pattern was largely suggested by the presence of
already existing roads on the estate, like Pitt
Street and Holland Street, and by other roads
around its edges. There was certainly no opportunity
for the kind of spacious planning with
which Allason was associated on the Ladbroke
estate. The houses erected on the Pitt estate
during the initial years of Eales's and Little's
development, however, seem to bear the mark of a
supervising architect's influence even though
several different builders were involved. They are
in the main relatively modest terrace houses consisting
of three storeys, usually with basements,
and except in the extreme south of the estate
in Holland Street and the southern end of Gordon
Place—they are stuccoed. The windows have
plain openings, although those on the first floor
are surmounted by cornices carried on consoles,
and the entrances have simple doorcases with
Doric pilasters but are without porches. A continuous
balcony with iron railings at first-floor
level and a plain or modillioned cornice at roof
level and a plain or remaining decorative features
(Plates 40d, 41b). There are variations, for
example at Nos. 10–13 (consec.) Campden Grove,
where bay windows rising from the basement
through all three main storeys are used to accentuate
the centre of the terrace, and subsequent
rebuildings coupled with the erosion of many of
the mouldings make it difficult to appreciate the
original homogeneity. The scale of the houses,
however, was well chosen for the somewhat constricted
layout and was not disproportionate to
already existing buildings around the estate.
While this uniformity could have been imposed
by Eales or Little, the fact that it is more
likely to have been the result of Allason's influence
is suggested by the adoption of the name Allason
Terrace for the first houses to be built as part of
the development. This terrace, now Nos. 67–81 (odd) Kensington Church Street, consists of
four storeys, the ground floor containing shops.
The upper storeys are stuccoed and display the
architectural features seen elsewhere, although
here used in a more elaborate manner. Two
houses at each end of the terrace are brought
forward and have pedimented cornices above the
first-floor windows, while originally a continuous
modillioned cornice extended the length of the
terrace above the third storey.
Another factor which points to Allason's
responsibility for general architectural control is
that towards the end of the development the
uniformity tends to become less marked. Allason
died in 1852 (ref. 15) and was succeeded as surveyor by
John Shaw, architect to Christ's Hospital. (ref. 16)
Houses completed after this date show far greater
variations, although Eales and Little were more
directly involved in the building operations than
earlier, when they had chiefly relied on other
builders. The south side of Gloucester Walk,
where building was still in progress in 1855, is
less homogeneous than other terraces, and to the
west of Hornton Street, where terraces give way
to detached and semi-detached villas, the houses
reflect the various stylistic predilections of their
builders. Nos. 3–9 (odd) Pitt Street provide an
instructive example, for these houses, which were
first leased in 1853, (ref. 17) were built by Jeremiah
Little but are more wilful in decorative treatment
than his earlier houses in Sheffield Terrace.
All of the leases granted under the agreement of
1844 were calculated to expire in 1943. The device
of a short period at a peppercorn rent was not
used, but the beginning of the term for each lease
was generally fixed at the nearest quarter day to
the date on which it was granted. Individual
ground rents ranged from £20 per annum for
No. 60 Sheffield Terrace, a substantial detached
house, to five shillings per annum for houses
built towards the end of the speculation when the
£900 guaranteed under the agreement had been
secured. (ref. 18) Although some leases were granted to
builders, many lessees were not connected with the
building trades. The principal speculators who
obtained leases of several houses were John
Simpson of St. George's, Hanover Square, and
Thomas Simpson of Paddington, licensed victuallers,
John Brannan Quick of St. Marylebone,
a paper stainer, (fn. c) Edgar Wright of St. Marylebone,
an ironmonger, Thomas Rogers of St. Marylebone,
a modeller, and William Philip Beech of
Rotherhithe, a ship breaker. (ref. 19) (fn. d) Stephen Pitt died
in 1848 and after that date leases were granted by
his widow and the trustees appointed under his
will.
Several builders did not receive direct leases
from the estate and presumably built under contract.
Among these was John Salmon of Wiple
Place, Kensington Church Street, who was the
first to commence building operations in 1845
with the erection of Nos. 67–81 (odd) Kensington
Church Street (Allason Terrace). The lessees of
this terrace were John and Thomas Simpson. (ref. 21)
Salmon also appears to have built all the houses
erected in Campden Grove as part of Eales's and
Little's development, namely Nos. 1–26 (consec.),
as well as Nos. 2–18 (even) Gordon Place, Nos.
70–76 (even) Hornton Street (originally known
as Campden House Road north of Holland Street)
and Nos. 1, 2, 12, and 13 Gloucester Walk
(formerly Gloucester Terrace). (ref. 22) Of these houses,
Nos. 5–8 Campden Grove have been rebuilt as a
result of the construction of the Metropolitan
Railway in 1865–8, while No. 22 Campden
Grove and No. 76 Hornton Street have been
substantially altered.
Another builder employed extensively during
the early stages of the development was Thomas
Casey of Kensington. He was principally responsible for Nos. 30–42 (even) Holland Street
(originally part of a range called Hornton
Terrace), Nos. 19–31 (odd) Gordon Place
(originally called Vicarage Street at this point)
and Gordon Cottages. In Holland Street he was
assisted by another local builder, William Potter,
who signed documents with a mark. (ref. 23)
The attractive cul-de-sac, formerly called
Orchard Street, which now forms the south end
of Gordon Place, was begun in 1846 (Plate 40c).
The main builders were Charles and Frederick
Sewell of Paddington, although others were involved, for the lease of No. 46 Gordon Place
was granted to Frederick Blucher Dowland of
Kensington, builder, and the lessee of No. 39
was George Edward Sewell of Camden Town,
builder. The first inhabitants of these houses were
generally artisans and there were several instances
of multi-occupancy. (ref. 24)
The houses on the south side of Pitt Street
were also erected during the 1840's, those to the
west of Gordon Place originally having ground-floor
shops. The builders were Gatehouse and
Company of St. Marylebone and a Mr. Watts of
Gracechurch Street. Watts built the pleasant
terrace formerly called Vassall Terrace, now
Nos. 10–18 (even) Pitt Street. (ref. 22)
Eales and Little did not apparently take a
direct part in the building operations until 1848,
the year in which Sheffield Terrace was begun,
but notices of the commencement of building for
all of the houses in that street erected under their
agreement were given to the district surveyor by
one or other of the partners, principally Little.
Of these Nos. 8–14 (even) were rebuilt in 1871
as a result of the construction of the Metropolitan
Railway, and the semi-detached villas to the west
of Hornton Street, originally called Percy Villas
and later Nos. 31–39 (odd) Sheffield Terrace,
were demolished after the war of 1939–45. Other
surviving houses built by Little are No. 90
Campden Hill Road, Nos. 41, 43, 62 and 64
Hornton Street and Nos. 3–9 (odd) Pitt Street. (fn. e)
Eales gave notice for the building of Nos. 49 and
51 Hornton Street and Nos. 80 and 82 Campden
Hill Road. (fn. f)
Another builder who figured prominently in
the later stages of the development was Thomas
Bridgewater Richardson of Paddington, who took
building leases of Nos. 3–11 and 14–21 (consec.)
Gloucester Walk in 1853–5. (ref. 27) Four of these
houses, Nos. 8–11, were built for him by William
Yeo of Paddington. (ref. 28) Of the original houses
Nos. 5–8 were rebuilt as a consequence of the construction
of the Metropolitan Railway. Richardson
also built Nos. 66 and 68 Hornton Street. (ref. 29)
In Tor Gardens (formerly York Villas) only
four houses on the south side, Nos. 1–7 (odd),
have survived. The builder of this attractive group
of two linked pairs was Thomas Bridges of St.
Marylebone in 1851. (ref. 30) Bridges also built Nos. 76
and 78 Campden Hill Road. (ref. 31)
The last houses to be built under the agreement
with Eales and Little were begun in 1855, and
with the erection of 185 houses in slightly over a
decade the development can be said to have
reached a successful conclusion. The houses
appear to have been taken as soon as they were
finished, generally by people who could afford
one or two servants; many of the occupants were
annuitants or otherwise living on unearned incomes. (ref. 32)
For Jeremiah Little this enterprise
marked the beginning of a most successful building
career in Kensington. He lived at No. 54
Sheffield Terrace (Wilton Villa), a house built by
himself (Plate 40a), and conducted building
operations on the Sheffield House, Glebe and
Phillimore estates as well as elsewhere in Kensington.
In 1861 he employed fifty men and ten boys.
At the time of his death in 1873 he owned, leasehold
or freehold, over one hundred houses in
Kensington and his estate was valued at over
£120,000, even after mortgage debts of £50,000
had been taken into account. His property was
divided between six of his children, two of whom,
Henry Little and Alfred James Little, followed
their father's trade. Another son, William, was
also a builder, but as he was not included in the
settlement he may have died before his father. (ref. 33)
Since 1864
The extension of the Metropolitan Railway to
Kensington, sanctioned by Act of Parliament in
1864, had an unfortunate effect on the appearance
of the Pitt estate. The course chosen for the railway
cut across the estate from north to south, and
although the line was carried in a tunnel several
houses had to be demolished for its construction.
When rebuilding took place after the tunnel was
completed, the new houses erected were often
disproportionate in scale to their neighbours. As
compensation for the loss of land which had to be
sold to the railway company the trustees of the
estate received £6,700. (ref. 34)
Perhaps the most glaring example of this unsympathetic
rebuilding occurred in Sheffield
Terrace, where in 1871 Jeremiah Little erected
four new houses, Nos. 8–14 (even), in place of
four which he had himself built about twenty
years previously and which had had to be demolished.
Little in fact purchased the fee simple of the
new houses from the Metropolitan Railway
Company. (ref. 35) They are of three storeys over a
semi-basement and are of greater height than the
terrace houses on each side, with bay windows and
a considerably more lavish use of ornamentation.
No doubt they reflect a change over two decades
in the type of house which the builder knew would
satisfy the needs of middle-class tenants.
Nos. 5–8 (consec.) Campden Grove and Nos.
5–8 (consec.) Gloucester Walk were also rebuilt
in 1871 under ninety-year leases granted by the
Metropolitan Railway Company. The builders
in each case were Igglesden and Myers of
Paddington. (ref. 36)
The most extensive rebuilding took place in
Gordon Place. The houses on the west side of
the street between Pitt Street and Holland Street
were demolished, and in 1872 the railway company
sold the vacant land to Charles Hall of
Lincoln's Inn, a barrister. In the following year
Hall engaged the local builder Thomas Hussey
to build a new terrace of nine houses, now Nos.
20–38 (even) Gordon Place, under ninety-nine-year
leases. (ref. 37) Also on the west side of the street,
Nos. 40–44 (even) were erected in 1871 by
William Cooke of Paddington under eighty-five-year
leases granted by the company; (ref. 38) these houses
replaced a Baptist chapel (see below) and a house
on the south-west corner of Holland Street and
Gordon Place.
Before the construction of the railway the
gardens of Newton House and Bullingham House
had extended to the east side of Gordon Place,
but the ends of these gardens had to be given up
and Nos. 1–17 (odd) Gordon Place were erected
in 1872–3 under eighty-five-year leases granted
by the company. No. 1, a substantial stuccoed
double-fronted house was built by William
Cooke; its rear elevation is shaped in a concave
curve to accommodate a ventilating shaft for the
railway at the rear of the house. Nos. 3–17 were
built by Samuel Sawyer of Paddington. (ref. 39) Nos.
7, 9 and 11 were rebuilt after the war of 1939–45.
The completion of building on the land taken
from the estate for the railway no doubt prompted
the trustees to develop the remaining frontage on
the south side of Campden Grove. Six houses were
erected there in 1877 under an agreement with
Thomas Thompson and Thomas Smith of
Paddington, builders and contractors, who offered
twenty shillings per foot frontage in ground
rents. (ref. 10) The actual builder was William Ford of
Pimlico, who obtained leases of five of the houses,
that for the remaining one (No. 27) being granted
to Thompson and Smith. An interesting feature
of these houses is that while Nos. 27–31 (consec.)
Campden Grove are of a typical debased classical
variety, faced with white brick and stucco dressings,
No. 32 was conceived as a studio-house and
is of stock brick with red brick dressings. The same
builder was responsible for all six houses and No.
32 appears to have been built as a speculation in
the manner of its neighbouring terraced dwellings—perhaps an indication of the catholicity of the
work the speculative builder was prepared to
undertake at this time of fluctuations in house
styles. (ref. 40)
The last major building operations to be undertaken
under the control of the estate date from
1894. In that year the copyhold of Newton House
and Bullingham House was enfranchised and the
two houses were demolished. Notice of the intention
to build six blocks of flats on the site was
given in November 1894 by Joseph Mears of
Earl's Court, but he died shortly afterwards and
the work was undertaken by Joseph T. Mears,
probably his son. Ninety-nine-year leases of
Bullingham Mansions, as the flats are called, were
granted to Charlotte Mears, the widow of Joseph
Mears, senior, at a total ground rent of £220. (ref. 41)
Also in 1894, William Adams Daw of the
building firm of C. A. Daw and Son of Palace
Gate, Kensington, and Percy Frederick Tarbutt
of Evelyn Gardens, an engineer, undertook to
build on the curtilage of Campden House along
the frontages to Gloucester Walk, Kensington
Church Street and Sheffield Terrace. Daw and
Tarbutt had obtained an assignment of the lease
of Campden House from the lessee, Mary Eliza
Elder, and surrendered the lease to Thomas
Morton Stanhope Pitt, who became tenant-for-life
of the estate under Stephen Pitt's will, in order
to secure a building agreement. At the same time
the strip of land above the Metropolitan Railway,
which ran under the grounds of Campden House,
was re-purchased by Pitt after having been sold
to the railway company which had in turn sold it
to Alexander Lang Elder, the late husband of
Mary Eliza Elder. (ref. 42)
The buildings erected in the former grounds of
Campden House are a mixture of blocks of flats
and large terraced houses, consisting of at least
four main storeys with basements and attics and
built predominantly of red brick. Some of the
building work was contracted out so that most of
the houses and flats on the south side of Sheffield
Terrace were built by Hawkins and Company of
St. Marylebone, and most of those on the north
side of Gloucester Walk by Hailey and Company
of Chelsea. (ref. 22) Daw and Son built the attractive
terrace of studio-houses in Kensington Church
Street called Campden House Terrace (Plate 40f).
Originally this consisted of six houses, the present
No. 7 forming part of No. 1 Sheffield Terrace.
Although several builders were involved in the
development the head leases were granted to Daw
and Tarbutt until June 1897, and after that date
to Daw alone. They were for ninety-nine years
from 1894 at a total ground rent of £300. (ref. 10)
<Since publication it has been possible to identify the architects of the buildings developed on the former Campden House grounds from correspondence in the possession of C. A. Daw & Son Ltd. Albert J. Bolton, who was architect to Thomas Morton Stanhope Pitt, provided elevations for the houses on the south side of Sheffield Terrace, and 'Mr Rolfe', who was the architect for Hailey & Company, provided them for the houses on the north side of Gloucester Walk. William G. Hunt was paid a small fee of £7 7s for 'professional services' in connection with the studios in Kensington Church Street.>
The building which attracted most contemporary
notice was the block of flats at the corner
of Sheffield Terrace and Hornton Street called
Campden House Chambers. The architects were
Thackeray Turner and Eustace Balfour, <though it was Turner who did the actual designs.> A. E.
Street commented that 'Campden House
Chambers . . . studiously simple in mass and
detail, is, in spite of some obvious affinities with
that of Mr. Philip Webb, an original and characteristic
work'. Originally the flats had a common
dining-room—a large, vaulted room in the basement—in which tenants were served at separate
tables. (ref. 43)
Little further change took place on the estate
until several buildings were destroyed or badly
damaged during the war of 1939–45. The most
severely affected area was at the northern end of
Hornton Street and in 1948 the London County
Council decided to acquire two sites with a total
area of two and a half acres, one on each side of
the street, by compulsory purchase for housing
purposes. Building of the housing estate, which
was given the name Tor Gardens estate, began in
1953. (ref. 44)
Campden House
Plate 39. Demolished
The entry in the court roll of the manor of
Abbots Kensington in 1609 admitting Sir Baptist
Hicks to a capital messuage and some surrounding
land contains a recital of the abuttals of the property
and seems to show beyond reasonable doubt
that the 'capital messuage' was on the site of
Campden House. (ref. 1) Moreover, this was almost
certainly the house in which (Sir) Walter Cope
was living in 1598, at the time of his quarrel with
Robert Horseman (ref. 45) (see page 25). (fn. g) The date
usually assigned to the building of Campden
House is 1612 on the evidence given in Lysons'
Environs that a window contained the arms of
Sir Baptist Hicks and his sons-in-law with that
date. In his analysis of the volume of drawings by
John Thorpe in Sir John Soane's Museum,
however, Sir John Summerson identified two
drawings—an elevation and a ground plan of a
timber-framed house—with Campden House,
but maintained that they were much earlier than
1612. (ref. 47) It now appears likely that these drawings
(numbers 95 and 96 in Thorpe's book) were of
the house which preceded Campden House and
which may have been built for Cope towards the
end of the sixteenth century. A comparison of
Thorpe's drawings with a painting showing
Campden House shortly after the Restoration
suggests that what took place in c. 1612 was perhaps
an enlargement and refronting in brick and
stone of the earlier house rather than a complete
rebuilding (Plate 39). (fn. h)
The later history of the house can only be
recounted briefly here. For a short time during
the Civil War it was used by the Committee of
Sequestrations for Middlesex, (ref. 18) and in the last
decade of the seventeenth century it was the
residence of Princess Anne of Denmark (later
Queen Anne) and her ill-fated son, styled the
Duke of Gloucester. (ref. 49) Early in the eighteenth
century the Countess of Burlington and her son,
the third Earl, who became an architect and patron
of the arts, lived there. (ref. 50) For almost a century
after Stephen Pitt purchased the Campden House
estate in 1751 the mansion was used as a boarding
school, and during this period it underwent considerable
alterations including the removal of
most of the decorative features from the south
front, which was rendered. In 1847 it was rented
by William Frederick Wolley, a landowner, who
spent considerable sums of money in restoring the
house. In 1854 he paid £6,225 for a new ninety-year
lease at a nominal annual rent of five
shillings. (ref. 51) Among the additions made to the
house by Wolley was a theatre in which Charles
Dickens acted with Wilkie collins in Collins's
play The Lighthouse in July 1855. (ref. 52)
In March 1862 Campden House was almost
totally destroyed by fire. Wolley had insured the
house and its contents for nearly £30,000, but
the insurance companies refused to pay, alleging
that he had started the fire deliberately. He brought
an action against one of the companies and won
his case. (ref. 53) The mansion was rebuilt, prsumably
out of the insureance money that Wolley was then
able to recover, as a reasonable facsimile of the
original, although with a somewhat fanciful
arragement of five gables on the south front. In
1872 Wolley sold his lease to the Metroplolitan
Railway Company, which had taken a strip of
land in the middle of the grounds for the construction
of its railway. The company in turn
assigned the lease to Alexander Lang Elder of the
City, esquire. (ref. 54)
In 1893 Elder's widow pur Campden house
up for auction but it failed to fetch the reserve
price of £25,000. (ref. 55) In the following year two
developers, william Adams Daw, builder, and
Percy Frederick Tarbutt, engineer, took an
assignment of the lease and surrendered it to the
freeholder, Thomas Morton Stanhope Pitt, in
exchange for an agreement to build in the grounds
of the house. (ref. 42) At first it was intended to preserve
the mansion while building around the periphery
of its grounds, and in 1897 Daw asserted that he
had no plans to demolish a house which had cost
about £25,000 to build. (ref. 56) Preseumably he also
found it imposlsible tosecure a remunerative price,
however, and in c 19000 the rebuilt house was
demolished and its site added to the communal
garden of the new development.
Little Campden House
Also known as The Elms and Laneaster Lodge.
Plate 41a. Demolished
Little Campden House was a long, two-storey
building on the west side of Campden House.
Lysons thought that it had been built in the 1690's
during the residence of Princess Anne of Denmark
(later Queen Anne) at Campden House in
order to provide accommodation for her household. (ref. 57)
A photograph of the building could well
date from the end of the seventeenthe century;
the modillioned cornice, the roof, the keystones
with masks above the first-floor windows, and the
narrow windows on each side of the centre are all
suggestive of this period, although the building
had undergone considerable alterations and was
probably originally brick-fronted. The earliest
map showing Kensington on a large scale, dated
1717, (ref. 58) shows the building, but it is strange that
if it was built for the purpose suggested by Lysons
no record of its construction has been discovered.
In 1850 the house was divided and two leases
for ninety-three and a quarter years were granted
to Jeremiah Little and William Eales respectively. (ref. 59)
Little's lease was of the eastern part,
which was sometimes given the name of The Elms
but usually referred to as Little Campden House
East or simply Little Campden House. The western
part, leased to Eales, acquired the name of
Lancaster Lodge and had its main entrance in
Campden House Road (now Hornton Street).
They were later designated No. 30 Gloucester
Walk and No. 80 Hornton Street respectively.
Both houses became very popular residences for
artists and several alterations and additions were
made. In 1944 they were badly damaged by a
bomb and were demolished shortly afterwards,
their sites now being incorporated in the Tor
Gardens housing estate.
In 1869 the Metropolitan Board of Works
gave consent for the erection of a studio to the
designs of Philip Webb in the garden of Lancaster
Lodge, then occupied by Robert Braithwaite
Martincau. A studio was built at the north corner
of Hornton Street and Gloucester Walk in that
year, and presumably this was the building designed
by Webb. (ref. 60) It was later designated No. 78
Hornton Street but was demolished with Lancaster
Lodge and no graphic record has been found.
Bethel Baptist Chapel, Holland Street
Demolished
This short-lived Baptist chapel on the south side
of Holland Street, near the south-western corner
with Gordon Place, was built in 1847 by Frederick
Blucher Dowland of Kensington under a lease
granted to Joseph Trigg of Chelsea, a coal merchant,
and John Doncaster of Kensington, a
builder. (ref. 61) It was demolished c. 1865 for the
building of the Metropolitan Railway.
No. 38 Sheffield Terrace
Plate 40b.
This house, which was known as No. 18
Sheffield Terrace until it was renumbered in
1927, was designed in 1876 by Alfred Waterhouse
for Edward Coningham Sterling. The builder
was W.H. Lascelles and the cost was about
£5,500. (ref. 62)
The ground on which the house was built had
been leased to William Eales in 1850 together
with the plot for No.42 Sheffield Terrace. Eales
then sub-let the ground for ninety-nine years
from 1844 to Henry Stock, the occupant of the
house in Bedford Gardens (now demolished)
which stood immediately to the north. (ref. 10) Stock
used the site for an extension to his garden but the
sub-lease contained there if they ranged in line with,
and were similar in elevation to, the houses on
each side in Sheffield Terrace. When Sterling,
who had acquired the house in Bedford Gardens,
wanted to have a new one built on the Sheffield
Terrace frontage, he ignored this provision and
the building which Waterhouse designed for him
contrasts very sharply in height, materials and
style with its neighbours.
It is a tall house of dark brick with some stone
dressings, and consists of a basement, three main
storeys and a large attic containing a lofty studio
with north light. Although the exterior has a
marked Gothic appearance, there is little evidence
of the Gothic style inside. The rooms are
well lit by the large windows, and are generously
proportioned, their chief decorative features
being arched alcoves, and simple cornices sparingly
enriched with paterae, rosettes and dentils. The
house is well built and functional, the fenestration
providing an accurate reflection of the internal
arrangements. The wooden balustrade of the imposing
open-well staircase owes little to architectural
precedent. Dividied into sections by large
newels, it consists of widely spaced balusters which
are turned in their upper parts, but which are
linked in their lower parts by struts and ties producing
an effect similar to the iron girders of a
bridge. (fn. i)