Development by Phillips in
Clarendon Road area, 1848–62
It will be recalled that after the great surge of
building in the Lansdowne Road area between
1842 and 1846 Roy (still acting on behalf of the
creditors of Duncan's estate) became entitled
to, and in June 1846 received, leases at peppercorn
rents from J. W. Ladbroke of the remaining
lands to the north of Lansdowne Rise. (ref. 154)
He could now raise capital on this undeveloped
land, and in April 1848 he disposed of some ten
acres of it, in the north-western extremity of
the estate (see fig. 45), to the first of the new
developers, Stephen Phillips, merchant, of New
Broad Street, City, who during the financial
crisis of 1847 had lent large sums of money to
Messrs. Roy, Blunt and Johnstone. (ref. 155)
Phillips was a large-scale speculator with extensive
building interests in Islington and on the
St. Stephen's estate at Westbourne Park, Paddington;
he was also the owner of some sixty leasehold
houses in Brompton, and probably had interests
in the timber trade. (ref. 156) The development of
Phillips's ten acres on the Ladbroke estate (of
which he acquired the freehold from Felix
Ladbroke in 1850) (ref. 157) was evidently only a subsidiary
part of his activities, and it is worth noting
that several of the builders to whom he granted
leases were from Islington or Paddington, and had
probably already worked with him there. The site
was poor—as yet remote, but close to the Potteries
and the adjacent brickfields—and he therefore
proceeded cautiously, the houses here being of
less pretension than on the adjoining parts of the
Ladbroke estate. In 1849 William Reynolds,
now apparently credit-worthy again, became the
lessee of several paired houses on the west side of
Clarendon Road, (ref. 158) but on the rest of Phillips's
land further north almost all the other houses
were built in unremarkable terraced rows. The
layout plan of c. 1846 (Plate 55b) was adhered to
in the formation of Cornwall Crescent, but
Clarendon Road was curved north-westward to
join with the adjacent estate of James Whitchurch.
H. W. Smith, the surveyor who was acting on
Phillips's behalf in 1852, may have been responsible
for this diversion. (ref. 159)
The principal building lessees working here
between 1852 and 1865 were J. V. Scantlebury,
who built most of Camelford Road, and Charles
Thompson, formerly of Paddington and Islington,
who built much of the north side of Cornwall
Crescent. Thomas Pocock, a solicitor who has
been previously mentioned as active elsewhere on
the Ladbroke estate, was the lessee for some thirty
houses on the west side of Clarendon Road. Some
or all of these houses may have been designed by
William King of Canonbury Park, Islington,
architect, who acted on Phillips's behalf in the
building of sewers in the Talbot Grove area. (ref. 160)
By 1861 Phillips had created improved ground
rents of £646, (ref. 161) and at his death in 1862 his
personal estate was valued at around £35,000. (ref. 162)
The development of the small remaining parts of
his Ladbroke estate property was completed soon
afterwards by his executors.
Land purchase and development
by Blake and Dr. Walker, 1850–3
The straightforward uneventful progress made
by such an experienced developer as Phillips was
in marked contrast with the feverish activity
surrounding the far larger and more risky
speculations of Richard Roy and his two principal
clients on the Ladbroke estate, C. H. Blake and
Edmund Walker's son, the Reverend Dr.
Samuel Walker. The ground landlord, Felix
Ladbroke, also involved himself in these operations,
and the activities of all four speculators were
concerted by a fresh plan for the lands east of
Ladbroke Grove which was drawn up by Thomas
Allom. The principal building lessee was David
Allan Ramsay, a nurseryman of Brompton, who
in 1848 had been one of William Reynolds's
assignees in bankruptcy (ref. 163) and who had himself
subsequently turned builder.
The business relationships which existed
between the various members of this group are
somewhat obscure. Until about 1855 Roy acted
as Blake's solicitor, and paid a small part of
Allom's professional fees, (ref. 3) the rest of which were
(so far as is known) paid by Blake; but there is no
reason to think that Roy had any share in the
profits and losses of Blake's speculation. Roy also
acted as Dr. Walker's solicitor, and managed the
day-to-day business of his client's estate, but here
he may have participated in the profits and losses
as well, for their speculation is referred to as a
'joint undertaking'. (ref. 164) On behalf of Duncan's
creditors he and his firm were concerned for very
many years in the administration of the area
already developed by Reynolds, the firm itself, to
which, it will be recalled, Duncan had owed
£45,000, being the principal creditor. Roy was
also involved, apparently on his own account, in
speculation in Portland Road, Ladbroke Gardens
and the northern half of Stanley Crescent. Felix
Ladbroke had his own solicitor, Edward Western,
and his own surveyor, Allason, and apart from his
evident involvement with Allom in the preparation
of the layout plan, acted independently of
Blake, Roy and Dr. Walker. Ramsay was granted
building leases by all four speculators, upon whom
he depended for capital; he seems, indeed, to have
occupied much the same position as that of
Reynolds in earlier years, and eventually he met
the same fate.
Blake was (as has already been stated) the largest
and ultimately the most successful speculator in
the development of Notting Hill and Notting
Dale, his activities eventually extending from
Lansdowne Road and Kensington Park Gardens
on the Ladbroke estate in the south through the
St. Quintin and Portobello estates as far as and
even beyond the Great Western Railway in the
north. He was born in Calcutta in 1794, the son
of Benjamin Blake, a master mariner and sea
captain who had been plying on the route to
India since 1775. Shortly after C. H. Blake's
birth his father left the sea, settled in Bengal, and
became an indigo planter. At first C. H. Blake
followed his father and an older brother into this
business. In the 1820's, however, he left India
for England, returning at about the time of his
brother's death in 1830, under whose will he
inherited over £5,000. Later he gave up indigo
planting to become a rum and sugar manufacturer,
an occupation which he continued to pursue until
leaving India for good in either 1842 or 1843,
and the profits from which, no doubt, provided
the basis for his speculations in Notting Hill. (ref. 165)
On arrival in England he acquired, in 1843,
William Chadwick's interest in the Ladbroke
lands to the west of Ladbroke Grove. (ref. 166) But when
in 1850 he bought twenty acres of land there from
Roy (then acting as trustee on behalf of Duncan's
creditors), (ref. 167) he ceased to be merely an investor
and at the age of fifty-five began his twenty-year
career as an active speculator.
These lands consisted of all but five acres of
the ground to the north of Lansdowne Rise and
Crescent which were still in Roy's trusteeship
after the sale of the north-western portion to
Phillips in 1848. The price for the unencumbered
leasehold interest was £22,580 (equivalent to
£1,129 per acre), all of which was used to pay
some of the existing creditors, including the
London and Westminster Bank, a firm of auctioneers
and Blake himself. (ref. 167) This price included the
benefit of six building leases already granted by
Roy, (ref. 3) but it evidently represented, nevertheless,
a substantial increase in land values since 1846,
when Roy had signed an abortive agreement to
sell the same land, though without the benefit of
six building leases, for £800 per acre. (ref. 168) In the
same year, 1850, Blake also bought the freehold
reversion from Felix Ladbroke for £4,200, (ref. 3)
bringing his total outlay on these twenty acres up
to £1,339 per acre. In 1851 he acquired both the
leasehold and freehold of the remaining five
acres. (ref. 169)
By September 1851 Blake had granted building
leases of Nos. 49 and 51 Lansdowne Road (fig.
54), Nos. 68–78 (even) Clarendon Road, and
Nos. 153–117 (odd) Elgin Crescent, most of these
houses being occupied by 1854. Nos. 145–117
were taken by David Allan Ramsay. (ref. 170)
In 1851, however, the strategy of land speculation
acquired a new form in response to an
unexpected turn of events elsewhere on the estate.
Martin Stuteley, to whom James Weller Ladbroke
had agreed in 1846 to lease twelve acres,
now the site of Ladbroke Square and the south
side of Kensington Park Gardens, and William
Sloane, to whom he had agreed to lease nine acres,
now the site of Stanley Crescent and Gardens
and the north side of Kensington Park Gardens,
had both failed to fulfil the terms of their
agreements, Sloane having died in 1848. By 1852
Felix Ladbroke had recovered possession of all
these lands, (ref. 171) which from their situation at or
near the summit of the hill were among the most
valuable on the whole estate, and resolved to
develop part of them himself.
Figure 54:
Nos. 49 and 51 Lansdowne Road, plans, elevation and details.
It was at this moment that Dr. Walker appeared,
hungry for land and able and willing to
pay handsomely for it. It has already been mentioned
that in 1842 his father, Edmund Walker,
a Master in the Court of Chancery, had acquired
an interest in Duncan's lands. In marked contrast
with his son, Edmund Walker was evidently
an extremely wily investor, and by 1845 he had
sold his interest in the Ladbroke estate, (ref. 172) and
thereafter confined his speculations to mortgages
in Paddington and Camberwell, acting through
the family firm of solicitors, Rickards and Walker
of Lincoln's Inn. (ref. 173) After his death in 1851 his
son, Dr. Samuel Walker, had inherited his 'very
large fortune, said to be a quarter of a million'.
Since 1841 Dr. Walker had been rector of St.
Columb Major in Cornwall, the richest living in
the county, worth £1,600 per annum. There he
had rebuilt the rectory at considerable personal
cost, hoping that it would become the palace of
the bishopric of Cornwall which it was his dearest
wish to see established. He had even offered his
living as an endowment for this great object, but
years elapsed without his proposal being definitely
accepted, and it was apparently in order to improve
the value of his offer that he began to
speculate in building, at first successfully at
Gravesend, and then on a very large scale at
Notting Hill. Here he had thought that his
operations would, when completed, earn him
£60,000 per annum, but being 'of a most amicable
disposition, regardless of all selfish interests, sincere
in the views he took, and truly religious in
heart and life', he proved ill-equipped for the
hurly-burly of suburban speculations. Within
four years of his father's death he had lost very
large sums of money; his living in Cornwall was
sequestered, and after 1863 he lived abroad for
several years until shortly before his death in
1869. (ref. 174)
Very soon after Edmund Walker's death in
July 1851 consultations must have taken place
between Felix Ladbroke, Roy, Blake and Dr.
Walker about the future development of the
remaining parts of the estate. In 1847 Ladbroke
had borrowed £25,000 from the Sun Fire
Office, (ref. 175) and in 1849 his surveyor, Allason, had
designed two ranges of houses to be built in the
future Kensington Park Gardens (Plate 56).
Shortly afterwards Ladbroke had made agreements
for the building of Nos. 1–9 (consec.) there
with W. J. Drew, (ref. 176) to whom he lent £3,000. (ref. 177)
Allason had previously been associated with Drew
in the building of houses in Ladbroke and
Clarendon Roads, and his designs for Kensington
Park Gardens would almost certainly have been
implemented (though in altered form) had he not
died in April 1852. Shortly afterwards Ladbroke
completed his arrangements for the repossession
of the land to the north of Kensington Park
Gardens, (ref. 178) and this required the revision of
Allason's scheme. Thomas Allom, who had acted
as Blake's architect since 1850 in the making of
'surveys and plans' for the lands to the west of
Ladbroke Grove, (ref. 3) now took Allason's place, and
by June 1852 he had, with Ladbroke's concurrence,
and probably with that of Roy and Dr.
Walker as well, prepared the executed layout plan
for Stanley Gardens, Stanley Crescent and the
north side of Kensington Park Gardens. (ref. 178)
By this time the pattern of land ownership in
the area was already being transformed by the
arrival of Dr. Walker. In March 1852 he had
bought Blake's twenty-five acres of freehold land
to the north of Lansdowne Rise. (ref. 179) Roy acted as
Dr. Walker's solicitor in this purchase, the price
being £32,000, (ref. 180) equivalent to £1,333 per acre
virtually the same rate as Blake had previously
paid in 1850. For this sum Dr. Walker also
acquired the benefit of the building leases successively
granted there by both Roy (before the
sale of 1850 to Blake) and by Blake, and of the
roads and sewers which they had built. After
having himself paid such a high price, Blake was
no doubt relieved to get rid of this expensive
investment without loss. Elsewhere in the
vicinity Dr. Walker was making other purchases,
and between 1852 and 1855 he acquired in all
some fifty-six acres of freehold ground in Kensington
Park and Notting Dale, besides contracting
to buy another thirty-four acres, all in Kensington,
and adjacent lands of unknown extent in Paddington
(see fig. 55). For his land on the neighbouring
Portobello estate, much of which was then still
remotely situated, he agreed to pay £1,000 per
acre, (ref. 181) compared with £828 per acre which Blake
was to pay for the same land in 1862, when the
impending construction of the Hammersmith
and City Railway was no doubt already enhancing
land values there. (ref. 3) By 1855 Dr. Walker's total
contractual liabilities for the purchase of land in
Kensington must have amounted to well over
£90,000.
In June 1852 Blake bought the unencumbered
freehold of part of the land of which Felix
Ladbroke had recently repossessed himself. This
comprised the sites now occupied by Stanley
Crescent, Stanley Gardens and the south side of
Ladbroke Gardens, some three and a half acres
in all, for which he paid only £1,575, or £450
per acre. (ref. 182) This extremely low price can, perhaps,
be explained by supposing that Ladbroke
wished to ensure the development of this site in
accordance with the plans prepared by Allom.
In the following year, 1853, Blake also bought
the freehold of the sites of the future No. 24
Kensington Park Gardens and 36–40 (even)
Ladbroke Grove, for which he paid £600. (fn. a) All
of the rest of the ground on the north and south
sides of Kensington Park Gardens, formerly held
under leasehold agreements by Sloane and Stuteley
respectively, was retained by Felix Ladbroke for
development on his own account.
Figure 55:
Lands in Kensington which Dr. Walker bought or contracted to
buy in 1852–5. Based on the Ordnance Survey of 1863–7
In all these dealings Roy acted as solicitor for
Blake, and as he had also acted for Walker in the
purchase of Blake's twenty-five acres it is hard
to resist the conclusion that it was he who had
arranged them all. This conjecture is strengthened
by the fact that in August 1852 Roy himself
bought part of Blake's new estate, the land later
to become the northern half of Stanley Crescent
and the south side of Ladbroke Gardens, and in
October he bought the whole of the north side of
Ladbroke Gardens and the south side of Arundel
Gardens from Dr. Walker. (ref. 183) Whatever the
relationship between Roy and Blake may have
been, the outcome was that they had each
acquired a small compact estate on the top of the
hill at a very low price, while the unworldly Dr.
Walker had burdened himself with a vast sprawling
holding on the still remote slopes and dales to
the north, and at an enormous cost.
These transactions coincided with and were no
doubt prompted by a rapid upsurge in the total
volume of building in northern Kensington, the
number of houses commenced there having risen
from 170 in the crisis year of 1847 to 350 in
1851. (ref. 184) As soon as they were able to do so
Ladbroke, Roy, Blake and Dr. Walker all
started to take advantage of this boom by granting
building leases. Roy had started on his leasehold
land on the western extremity of the Ladbroke
estate, where between 1851 and 1853 he granted
over eighty building leases in Portland Road and
Heath field Street to David Allan Ramsay. We
have already seen that Ramsay was also at this
time Blake's principal building lessee for houses
in Elgin Crescent, but he was quite willing to
oblige Dr. Walker as well, and of the 120 building
leases which Dr. Walker granted in November
and December 1852 on his lands to the west of
Ladbroke Grove, Ramsay or his relative Henry
Malcolm Ramsay took 37, most of them on the
north-west side of Elgin Crescent (Nos. 58–120
even). (ref. 185)
But it was on the best land at the summit of the
hill that Ramsay undertook his largest commitments.
Here Blake had decided to develop his
freehold estate by direct contract instead of by the
normal building lease procedure, and in 1853 he
signed a contract with Ramsay for the building
of forty houses (Nos. 1–11 consec. Stanley
Crescent and 1–29 consec. Stanley Gardens) for
some £64,000. Nos. 12 and 13 Stanley Crescent
were subsequently included in this contract, at an
extra cost of £4,000. (ref. 3) Close by on the north side
of Kensington Park Gardens, where Ladbroke
was the freeholder in possession, Blake took
building leases of all twenty-three plots (Nos.
25–47 consec.), and in 1852–3 sub-leased eighteen
of them to Ramsay, or to Ramsay's business
associates (Nos. 26–31, 36–47). (ref. 186) In 1853 Blake
also granted building leases to Ramsay for the
adjacent Nos. 36–40 (even) Ladbroke Grove. (ref. 187)
Finally in 1853 Ladbroke himself granted Ramsay
the remainder of his lands on the south side of
Kensington Park Gardens for the erection of thirteen
houses, Nos. 10–22 consec. (see fig. 45). (ref. 188)
Designs by Thomas Allom, 1850–5
Almost all of the houses which now began to go
up in this vicinity were designed by Thomas
Allom. Besides having trained as an architect and
been a founder member of the Royal Institute of
British Architects, he was also famous as an artist,
and in 1853 he exhibited at the Royal Academy
a picture entitled 'Stanley Crescent, (fn. b) Kensington
Park Terrace etc. now building at Kensington
Park Notting Hill for Charles Henry Blake esq
from the designs and under the supervision of
T. Allom'. (ref. 189) This may probably be identified
with the very fine lithograph reproduced on
Plate 64a. Allom's principal client was certainly
Blake, but the incomplete surviving accounts
show that he also made 'plans and surveys' for
Roy, (ref. 3) and Dr. Walker may have been involved
as well, for Allom's design for the long range on
the north side of Ladbroke Gardens had certainly
been settled in October 1852, when Walker sold
this land to Roy. (ref. 190) Ladbroke, however, is not
known to have employed Allom, but a building
agreement of 1852 between Ladbroke and
Ramsay for Nos. 10–22 (consec.) on the south
side of Kensington Park Gardens makes it perfectly
clear that Ramsay was required to build in
accordance with Allom's designs. (ref. 188)
All of Allom's houses still survive (see Frontispiece,
Plates 64
5
6, figs. 56–60 and elevational
drawing between pages 234–5). They are Nos.
24–47 (consec.) on the north side of Kensington
Park Gardens, No. 24 at the north corner of
Ladbroke Grove being Blake's own house
(Frontispiece), where he lived from 1854 until
1859; Nos. 10–22 (consec.) on the south side of
Kensington Park Gardens; Nos. 1–13 (consec.)
Stanley Crescent and 1–29 (consec.) Stanley
Gardens, being the forty-two houses built under
Blake's contract with Ramsay, for which Allom
provided 'surveys, valuations, plans, elevations,
sections, specifications'; Nos. 36–40 (even)
Ladbroke Grove, and Nos. 1–23 (consec.)
Ladbroke Gardens. In 1855 Allom also supplied
Blake with drawings for Nos. 14–21 (consec.)
Stanley Crescent (Roy having sold this and the
land on the south side of Ladbroke Gardens back
to Blake), (ref. 3) but the houses eventually built
here were not by Allom. On the east side of
Kensington Park Road he was the architect for
St. Peter's Church (Plate 13), built in 1855–7,
Blake having acquired the site of the church and
of other adjacent land from Thomas Pocock in
1855. (ref. 191)
Figure 56:
Kensington Park Gardens, gateway into Ladbroke Square
In addition to designing the houses, Allom was
also responsible for the new layout plan for the
area between Kensington Park Gardens and
Ladbroke Gardens. The idea of a broad straight
street (Kensington Park Gardens) leading eastward
from St. John's Church to Kensington Park
Road was taken from Allason's plan of 1849
(Plate 56), and the idea of communal gardens was,
of course, borrowed from earlier precedents to the
west of Ladbroke Grove. By the formation
of Stanley Crescent and Stanley Gardens he
provided three more such enclosures, and all but
two of his 105 houses abutted either directly or via
a small private garden on to either one of his three
new enclosures or on to Ladbroke Square or the
enclosure between Ladbroke and Arundel Gardens.
Figure 57:
No. 20 Kensington Park Gardens, details
Figure 58:
Nos. 20 and 24 Kensington Park Gardens, details
But while the layout owned much to the example
of earlier developments, the architectural forms
on this part of the Ladbroke estate changed completely
from those previously employed elsewhere.
The last threads of the old Georgian traditions,
which had been apparent in the terraces of
Ladbroke Square, Kensington Park Road and
some of the paired villas built by Reynolds and
Drew, were now abandoned in favour of a grand
display in the latest taste. Allom's early reputation
was made as a landscape painter and his compositions
appear to have been designed with scenic
effect uppermost in his mind. The design of
houses, streets, gardens and tree-planting is seen
with a painter's eye, so that each turn and every
vista is composed in a picturesque manner.
Blake's own house (Frontispiece) forms a suitably
impressive approach to the splendours of Kensington
Park Gardens, and frequent glimpses of grass
and trees relieve the stucco façades, which are
designed in a freely treated Italianate manner with
occasional introductions from Empire and other
sources.
It says much for Allom's brilliant scenic display
that his strange sort of grandeur is still evident in
spite of all the damage that the twentieth century
has done. He adopted a more flexible, more
romantic approach than the architects of South
Kensington or Bayswater. His skill was to make
use of the terrace ends, the junctions and the
curves in the streets, to introduce special emphasis
with great bowed projections, turrets, columnar
screens and houses of curious plan forms. His
predilection for paired houses placed side by side
on the terrace ends, thrusting out bows on all
sides, is apparent over and over again.
In the details of the designs, too, the contrast
between this work of the 1850's and the traditions
surviving in the earlier decades of the century is
equally marked. Where the late Georgian buildings
had been characterized by restraint, elegance
and structural economy, Allom's houses typify
the new ideals of grandeur and display. The detail
becomes less refined although it is disposed with
professional assurance to gain the maximum effect.
Not only is the ornament profuse but the use of
materials—stucco, timber, iron and stone—is
lavish. Where earlier builders had reduced the
sections of timber members and mouldings to
produce the slenderest and most refined effects,
these houses, characteristic of the middle years of
the century, employ materials in a manner which
reflects the growing material prosperity of the
nation as well as a growing tendency towards
ostentation. Their construction makes widespread
use of stone in hallways, landings and
stairs—always to the first floors and sometimes
higher. Structural timbers in floors and framed
partitions are substantial, there is a free use of
cast iron and plaster enrichment internally, and
the extensive stucco ornamentation to garden
fronts as well as the principal façades must have
added considerably to constructional costs as well
as subsequent maintenance. Houses in Stanley
Gardens at least appear to have been provided with
slate damp-proof courses.
Many of the houses display more than usually
ambitious interiors for this class of building. For
example Nos. 1 and 2 Stanley Crescent and 12
Stanley Gardens all have lavish entrance halls and
open-well staircases, whilst No. 24 Kensington
Park Gardens has a rich interior in the French
taste (Plate 66b). Both inside and out the scale
is as large and the enrichment as profuse as the
social status of the development could support.
Along the northern side of the great sevenacre
garden of Ladbroke Square, which formed
the south side of Kensington Park Gardens, were
ranged very large houses with frontages in excess
of thirty feet (Plates 64c, 66a). They are of four
main storeys above a basement, completely
stuccoed back and front with great segmental
bows to the south, facing the garden. In the
principal range (Nos. 10–22 consec.) we find in
the façades that all-over richness which the
Victorians admired so much. The design is really
a study in terrace articulation of the same kind as
that to be found in St. James's Gardens on the
Norland estate, but far more complicated and now,
thanks to later additions and mutilations, extremely
difficult to analyse. On careful inspection,
however, it resolves itself into the formula:
AB1A — AA — AB2A — AA — AB1A
The B type house in the centre of each block
has a colonnade with paired columns and pilaster
responds in the ground storey. The order is
Tuscan in the wings and Corinthian in the middle.
Figure 59:
No. 24 Kensington Park Gardens, details
Figure 60:
Kensington Park Gardens and No. 2 Stanley Crescent, details
The other houses on the south side of Kensington
Park Gardens (Nos. 1–9 consec.), are by
contrast entirely different, and are not Allom's
work. They consist of three four-storey groups,
each of three houses, and were all built under
building agreements of 1849–50 between Felix
Ladbroke and W. J. Drew, (ref. 192) whose work elsewhere
on the estate has already been discussed.
Nos. 1–3 (Plate 62f), which have segmental
bowed fronts and a double order of stucco pilasterstrips
each rising through two storeys, are
amplifications of the smaller design previously
executed by Drew, probably in conjunction with
Thomas Allason, at Nos. 12 and 14 Clarendon
Road. Nos. 4 and 6–9 are more Italianate in
manner, but the pilasters favoured by Drew and/or
Allason are again used. No. 5 has been completely
rebuilt in obtrusive brick and terra-cotta.
On the north side of Kensington Park Gardens
(Plate 64b and elevational drawing between
pages 234–5) Allom placed two palace facades
flanking an arched entry to the communal garden.
This entry was set on an axis with the northern
gate to Ladbroke Square so that the two gardens
were closely related.
The backs of all of Allom's houses facing the
gardens were treated with as much care as the
fronts. In some cases they were even more
ambitious—on the south side of Stanley Gardens,
for Instance, where the most lavish display is
retained for the southern elevations facing the
gardens (Plate 66c, d). These facades are enlivened
by segmental bow windows of two and three
storeys. The stucco of the ground floor is banded
and grooved to resemble ashlar work, and a continuous
balcony is carried on ornate consoles at
first-floor level. The bows and architraves of the
windows on the first floor are ornamented with a
freely adapted version of the Corinthian order,
and the bows are surmounted by stucco balustrades.
Where the bay is three storeys high,
however, the central window at first-floor level
is crowned by a segmented pediment carried on
consoles, whilst the Ionic order is introduced on
the second floor of the bow only, the window
opening normally having plain architraves and
cornices.
Allom's connexion with Blake seems to have
ended in 1855. (ref. 3) An obituary notice published
after his death in 1872 refers vaguely to his
'covering the Kensington Park Estate with
mansions, for the late Mr. C. H. Blake, at a cost
of nearly £200,000'. (ref. 193) In his later speculations,
which were all in areas of less ambition, both
socially and architecturally, Blake contented himself
with the professional services of an undistinguished
local man, J. C. Hukins of Westbourne
Grove, architect and surveyor. (ref. 3)
Building boom and collapse
in the early 1850's
In 1852 the number of new houses commenced
in northern Kensington reached a peak figure of
700 (ref. 184) though many of them were not completed
until some years later. This great spurt of
building involved a large amount of capital,
most of which was supplied to the builders by the
developers. In Kensington Park Gardens Felix
Ladbroke, despite the heavy mortgages which he
had himself already made, (ref. 194) raised money to
enable him to lend £12,000 to D. A. Ramsay for
his building on the south side, (ref. 195) while on the
north side Blake also lent large sums to Ramsay,
besides paying for the contract building in Stanley
Crescent and Gardens, all apparently out of his
own resources, for there is no evidence yet of
Blake's having had to borrow. (ref. 196)
But by far the largest single source of capital
was the unfortunate Dr. Walker. In 1853–4 he
advanced over £66,000 to builders on the security
of building leases which he had himself granted, (ref. 197)
Ramsay being the largest borrower. He also lent
money to builders working on Roy's land, notably
in Portland Road and Arundel Gardens, (ref. 198) and in
the case of Ramsay he made additional loans on the
security of building leases in Kensington Park
Gardens which were already mortgaged to
Ladbroke. (ref. 199) He seems to have had difficulty in
converting his own great inherited wealth into
ready cash, and in the spring of 1853 he had to
assign a number of his own mortgage loans, some
to a group of City men, and others to a group in
Edinburgh, including one banker. (ref. 200) In September
Blake, who needed money to pay for the Stanley
Crescent building contract with Ramsay, began
to press him for payment for the lands to the west
of Ladbroke Grove which he had bought from
Blake in 1852, a large part of the full price of
£32,000 being still outstanding. (ref. 3) And in December
Dr. Walker in turn began to press Ramsay,
who was at that time clamouring for more money
to enable him to pay for the timber needed to
complete the large number of houses in course of
erection on Roy's land in Portland Road. Dr.
Walker was now so deeply involved that he had
no option but to plunge still further in, and he lent
Ramsay another £5,500, secured chiefly by
Ramsay's building leases on the north side of
Kensington Park Gardens, which had already,
of course, been mortgaged to Blake. (ref. 3)
In February 1854 the whole of Dr. Walker's
short-lived, precarious empire collapsed when
Ramsay was declared bankrupt. (ref. 3)
(fn. c) Between 1852
and 1856 there was a steep decline in the total
volume of house building throughout West
London, and in northern Kensington the number
of new houses commenced fell from 700 in 1852
to 225 in 1854. (ref. 184) Excessive building had far
outstripped demand, which in this area continued
to be relatively limited until the building of the
Hammersmith and City Railway in the mid
1860's.
This collapse gave large parts of Notting Hill a
notoriety from which they did not recover for
some ten years. The whole of Dr. Walker's
property, extending from All Saints' Church on
the Portobello estate in the east, to Clarendon
Road in the west, was affected. At All Saints'
Church, the citadel of the whole disastrous enterprise,
building was suspended from about 1855
to 1859, and even in 1861 The Building News
could still record that throughout the whole area
'The melancholy vestiges of the wreck . . . are
not yet wholly cleared away. The naked carcases,
crumbling decorations, fractured walls, and slimy
cement-work, upon which the summer's heat and
winter's rain have left their damaging mark, may
still be seen on the estate. Courageous builders
have occasionally touched them and lost heart and
money by the venture . . . With misfortune came
insult, and the opprobrious epithet of "Coffinrow"
was fixed upon the dead street, where the
windows had that ghastly form [Ladbroke
Gardens]. The "Stumps" was a term given to
another range of what was intended to be gentlemen's
residences. The whole estate was as a
graveyard of buried hopes.' (ref. 202)
On the north side of Kensington Park Gardens,
where Ramsay had been heavily involved, the
original leases granted by Ladbroke in 1852 were
surrendered, and in the autumn of 1854 new
ones were granted to Blake and Dr. Walker as
creditors. (ref. 203) Blake also acquired the freehold of
five houses here, (ref. 204) and all his houses were
probably completed by contract. Four of Dr.
Walker's were evidently finished by J. D. Cowland,
a local builder to whom a sub-lease was
granted in 1856. (ref. 205) The whole street appears to
have been completed by about 1858. (ref. 144)
In the complicated process of sorting out
Ramsay's disordered affairs, which extended over
several years, Dr. Walker appears to have been
the principal loser, for by 1856 Ramsay himself
had changed his role once more and set up as an
auctioneer in the City. (ref. 206) In February 1855 Dr.
Walker was still buying land (to the east of
Ladbroke Grove, between Elgin Crescent and
Westbourne Park Road), but he was unable to pay
in cash for it, (ref. 207) and he already owed large sums
to the London and Westminster Bank for which
Blake was (through transactions in bills of exchange)
also responsible. He still owned Blake
£12,000 for the lands to the west of Ladbroke
Grove, which in January 1855 he was obliged to
mortgage to Blake subject to repayment within
six months, (ref. 3) and another £25,000 was due for
payment in September on a mortgage of his lands
on the Portobello estate. (ref. 208) In March 1855, when
his total mortgage debts (including the items
already mentioned) amounted to some £90,000,
he handed over the management of all his estate
in Kensington to three trustees, H. M. Kemshead,
a West India merchant, E. Robins, an auctioneer,
and the solicitor who had acted for him in all his
dealings, Richard Roy. (ref. 209) It was only four years
since he had inherited his great fortune.
Blake's financial arrangements,
1854–60
If Dr. Walker was the principal loser in the confusions
of the mid 1850's, Blake was in the long
run the principal beneficiary. But first he had to
overcome the immediate problems caused by
Ramsay's bankruptcy, and then to weather the
threat of total disaster in 1858–60. Under the
terms of the contract for building Nos. 1–11
Stanley Crescent and 1–29 Stanley Gardens, he
had paid Ramsay rather more than half the total
price of £64,000 and was left with forty unfinished
houses on his hands. He at once invited
builders to tender for completing the work, and
the eleven houses on the north side of Stanley
Gardens were finished by Messrs. Locke and
Nesham. Thomas Allom, the architect, offered to
undertake the rest of the work himself, but ultimately
Blake allowed himself to be persuaded to
employ his own clerk of works, Philip Rainey, on
all the other twenty-nine houses, plus Nos. 12
and 13 Stanley Crescent and Nos. 36, 38 and 40
Ladbroke Grove. The result was not a success.
It was evidently through Blake's decision to
employ Rainey as a contractor that his connexion
with Allom came to an end in the autumn of 1855.
Rainey submitted extortionate bills to Blake, and
when all the work was finally completed in 1858
the total cost amounted to some £11,000 more
than the original contract with Ramsay. (ref. 3)
These operations were financed by substantial
mortgages made from November 1854 onwards
by Blake through various firms of solicitors, including
the firm employed by J. W. Ladbroke
until his death in 1847 to manage the whole
Ladbroke estate. (ref. 210) With ready money available
Blake was therefore able to profit from the complex
situation arising from the general slump in
building in 1853–4. In January 1855 he extended
his operations to the east side of Kensington Park
Road, where he bought from the solicitor, Thomas
Pocock, all of the freehold land between Westbourne
Grove and the backs of the houses on the
north side of Chepstow Villas. (ref. 211) This acquisition
enabled him to present the Ecclesiastical Commissioners
(and the inhabitants of his estate) with
a site for a church, St. Peter's, designed (as we
have already seen) by Thomas Allom, (ref. 212) and
well placed to close the vista along Stanley
Gardens (Plate 64d). The houses to the south of
the church, Nos. 76–90 (even) Kensington Park
Road, were built in 1859–61 by Philip Rainey
to the designs of Edward Habershon, architect. (ref. 213)
The land to the north of the church was sold by
Blake in 1861 to Joseph Offord, gentleman. (ref. 214)
By 1856, however, Blake's liabilities were
mounting rapidly. (ref. 215) Although fourteen of the
twenty-three houses on the north side of Kensington
Park Gardens were now occupied, only one in
the whole of Stanley Crescent and Stanley
Gardens was yet inhabited, (ref. 144) and money was
needed to pay Rainey's bills. The debt of £12,000
due from Dr. Walker for the lands to the west of
Ladbroke Grove could no longer be left unpaid,
and after allowing him a whole year's grace, Blake
foreclosed and in July 1856 some ten of the twentyfive
acres which Dr. Walker had bought from
Blake in 1852 were put up for sale by auction.
But no bidder appeared, and so three months
later Blake bought them back himself, for about
£795 per acre. (ref. 3)
Kensington Park Gardens, plans and elevations
This was no doubt a good bargain if he could
afford to wait for the next building boom for a
return on his money, but the purpose of the foreclosure
had been to obtain ready money, not to
extend the scope of his speculations. Through his
new solicitors, Messrs. H. and G. Lake and
Kendall of Lincoln's Inn, to whom he had
recently transferred all his legal business, he was
able in June 1856 to add another £6,000 to his
mortgage commitments, (ref. 3) but by April 1858 he
was falling in arrears over payments of interest,
some of them now at six per cent. In 1857–8 he
sold two newly completed houses in Stanley
Gardens, (ref. 216) but he was also negotiating more
loans through Lake and Kendall, (ref. 217) and his
affairs were in a very precarious state, with his
mortgagees pressing for payment, when the great
crisis of his career beset him.
Since its incorporation in 1853 Blake had been
a director of the Portsmouth Railway Company,
of which Richard Roy was the solicitor. After
investing heavily in this company Blake had had a
dispute with one of his co-directors, Francis
Mowatt, about the purchase of shares, and in 1854
he had filed a bill of complaint in Chancery. Blake
also considered that Roy had deceived him in these
transactions, and this was evidently the cause for
his removal of his legal business from Roy to Lake
and Kendall. The railway did not prove successful,
and nor did Blake's lawsuit, for the verdict
of the court, given in July 1858, was that Blake
must pay Mowatt £20,520, plus interest and
costs, by 3 November. (ref. 218) After an unsuccessful
appeal to a higher court Blake failed to raise the
money, and on 1 November Mowatt grudgingly
granted him another six months in which to pay. (ref. 3)
According to his own calculations, Blake's total
assets, including the house in St. Marylebone
where he had formerly lived, his furniture and
plate and his railway shares, now amounted to
£172,000, and his mortgages to £100,000. His
attempts to raise more money through a stockbroker
and then through the London Assurance
Corporation were, however, rejected, and he was
therefore compelled to grant an option to sell all
his property at Notting Hill to a firm of land surveyors
and auctioneers, Messrs. Farebrother,
Clark and Lye of Lancaster Place, Strand.
According to their surveys, the cost price of his
property there amounted to £116,000, and their
own valuation of it to £99,090, which they
estimated would eventually yield an annual rental
of £5,525. They nevertheless agreed to lend him
£25,000 at five per cent interest, subject to his
selling enough of his property to procure repayment
by the end of May 1859. Blake was to
execute a mortgage to Clark and Lye of his
entire estate, including his railway shares, subject
to the existing encumbrances, and if the auction
sale did not yield enough to provide for repayment,
and if Blake did not within one month
thereafter repay all the money due, Clark and
Lye were to be at liberty to sell everything without
the safeguard of reserve prices. (ref. 3)
The debt to Mowatt was quickly paid off with
the loan from Clark and Lye, but when the fortysix
freehold and five leasehold houses and the
building land were offered for sale in individual
lots in May 1859, only two lots were bought,
Nos. 6 and 7 Stanley Crescent, for prices slightly
lower even than Clark and Lye's own valuation.
Unexpectedly, the fall in the value of Blake's
estate saved him. It was no use for the creditors
to press their claims at a time when demand was
low. Fifteen of the houses were still unoccupied,
and four (Nos. 12–15 Stanley Gardens) were still
unfinished; it was clearly more advantageous to
wait for better times. During the next few months
several more houses were sold privately, and after
the railway shares had been sold £13,000 of the
debt to Clark and Lye were repaid. To reduce
his own personal expenditure Blake removed from
his fine house at No. 24 Kensington Park
Gardens to the much less eligible No. 21 Stanley
Gardens. In September the largest single creditor,
Simmonds, to whom Blake owed £23,500, gave
notice requiring repayment, but he does not seem
to have pressed his claim, and early in 1860 Blake
secured another loan of £18,000 at five per cent,
by means of which Clark and Lye were paid off
and the other creditors for the time being pacified.
After being 'in the red' for the previous two years
Blake's balance sheet now showed a small surplus,
though the £645 excess of income over outgoings
only amounted to a yield of about one-half per
cent on his total investment. (ref. 3)
Blake's new backers were William Honywood
of Berkshire, esquire, William Harrison of St.
Helen's Place, City, merchant, and Henry Cobb
of Lincoln's Inn Fields, land agent and surveyor,
who in addition to their loan of £18,000 also
immediately accepted a transfer of Simmonds's
mortgage. (ref. 219) Like Clark and Lye, they took a
mortgage of all Blake's property, and they remained
his principal source of capital for the rest
of his career, a condition of the arrangement
being that a member of the firm of Lake and
Kendall, Blake's solicitors, should act as receiver
of the rents and profits of the estate. (ref. 3)
The census of 1861 shows what kind of people
lived in Blake's new houses. All of the forty-six
houses listed in the census return for Kensington
Park Gardens were by then occupied, although the
stone-sawyer who lived at No. 1 with his wife
and two daughters was probably only a caretaker
put in to look after the place until a tenant could
be found. The total number of residents was 408,
of whom 152 were servants. The average number
of inhabitants per house (excluding No. 1) was
thus slightly under 9, of whom 3.4 were servants.
Two houses were already each divided into two
separate households, and there were also two girls'
schools, one of which occupied two adjoining
houses. The householders included ten 'fundholders'
or 'proprietors of houses', plus one
'baronet's widow', who was perhaps too proud of
her title to specify the source of her income.
There were also five lawyers, five merchants
(four in foreign trade), three army officers (all of
field rank and above, but in the East India
service) and one admiral who was also a Member
of Parliament. Other householders included two
warehousemen, two clerks, and one tea-broker,
stockbroker, hatter, optician, civil servant, architect,
veterinary surgeon and a professor at University
College. At the two schools the presence of
nine resident mistresses and twenty-seven boarding
pupils suggests that day-girls were also taught.
The servants' hierarchy included butlers, footmen,
ladies' maids, grooms and pages. (ref. 220)
In Stanley Crescent all of the thirteen houses
built by Blake were occupied by 1861, but of the
twenty-nine in Stanley Gardens four were empty.
The total number of residents in these thirtyeight
occupied houses was 323, of whom 109
were servants. The average number of inhabitants
per house was thus 8.5, of whom 2.6 were servants.
In Stanley Gardens one house was already
divided into two households, and there were no
fewer than five girls' schools, plus another two in
Stanley Crescent. The householders included six
fundholders, six merchants (three in foreign trade),
five lawyers, and one army captain, military tailor,
coachmaker and club secretary. The residents
included seventeen schoolmistresses and governesses,
and twelve of the householders were
women. (ref. 221)