CHAPTER VI - Prince of Wales Terrace
Prince of Wales Terrace is a development of twenty-two
houses laid out and built between 1862 and 1865 upon
the site of an early-nineteenth-century villa, latterly known
as Madeley House. Prior to the building of this villa the
ground here had belonged to Gerard Noel Noel (see page
56), and in the second half of the eighteenth century it
had formed part of the extensive gardens of old Kensington House (see page 60).
When, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, the
Noel estate was broken up, the future site of Prince of
Wales Terrace—a piece of just under one and a half
acres—was bought, in 1802, by Samuel Drewe, esquire,
of Kensington. Drewe promptly erected a detached villa
there for his own residence which Faulkner (in 1820) described as ‘a large new house … built in the cottage style’. (ref. 1)
No illustration of the house is known but later plans show
it to have been a rectangular building, set well back from
Kensington Road, with a square-piered portico in the
centre of the north front and a colonnade or verandah
extending across the whole width of the south front. An
office wing, its southern front screened by a hot-house,
linked the house to a stable block on the west. (ref. 2)
Drewe lived there from about 1804 until 1837. (ref. 3) The
house was next occupied for three years by Sir John Scott
Lillie, a landowner in Fulham, and then by William Hoof,
a wealthy public works contractor, who bought the freehold in 1840. (ref. 4) Hoof called his newly acquired property
Madeley House, after the village in Shropshire where he
was born. In the 1820s Hoof had been one of the principal
contractors working on the Kensington Canal (see page
323)—an undertaking in which Sir John Scott Lillie was
a substantial investor. But it was as a railway contractor
in the late 1830s and '40s that he made his fortune. He
worked on both the Croydon Railway and the London and
Brighton Railway. (ref. 5) In 1840, the year of his move to
Madeley House, Hoof undertook some small-scale building development on the adjoining Vallotton estate immediately to the south, and in 1850–1 he sacrificed the southern
end of his garden for part of Cambridge Place and to provide sites for Nos. 2 and 4 Victoria Road. (This development, inextricably tied up with his building activities on
the Vallotton estate, is described on pages 140–1.)
Hoof lived at Madeley House until his death there in
August 1855 at the age of sixty-seven. (ref. 6) His estate was
valued for death duties at £148,000, which though well
short of the ‘half a million sterling’ predicted in The
Gentleman's Magazine and elsewhere, was still a very substantial sum. (ref. 7) Under the terms of Hoof's will Madeley
House was to have been occupied by his widow for as long
as she remained a widow. But she died of shock only a
few hours after her husband, and the house was vested
in trustees to be sold for the benefit of their children. (ref. 8) In
1858 it was bought by John Patten Good, a surveyor with
the General Post Office, who with his wife and family
occupied Madeley House until 1861, when the property
was sold for development. (ref. 9)
Figure 39:
Prince of Wales Terrace. Based on the Ordnance Survey of 1952–68
The purchaser was the Devon-born builder Richard
Yeo. A speculative builder, like his rather better-known
brother Robert, Yeo had been active in the Paddington
and St. John's Wood areas in the 1850s. But by 1861,
although aged only forty-nine, he was evidently in semi-retirement, living in Ealing—where he occupied a grand
Italianate villa called Drayton House—and describing
himself as ‘esquire’ or (ten years later) ‘landowner’. (ref. 10) His
obituary notice, in 1878, makes no mention of his connection with the building trade, dwelling only on his later
‘public’ career as member of local boards and his involvement with local charities. (ref. 11)
Yeo did not himself participate in the development of
Madeley House, his role being that of ground landlord,
and the developer of the site was the builder Thomas
Cawley of Porchester Gardens, Bayswater. An agreement,
whereby Yeo undertook to let the site to Cawley for building on 99-year leases from Christmas 1861 and Cawley
undertook to erect twenty-four houses there, was not
signed until June 1862, (ref. 12) but effectively it had been in
operation since the end of 1861. In fact Cawley's proposals
for laying out the site were submitted for the approval of
the Metropolitan Board of Works over a week before the
signing of the document conveying Madeley House to
Yeo. (ref. 13)
The original plan was for a north-south street, parallel
to Victoria Road, having twelve houses on each side, linking Kensington Road and Cambridge Place. The disadvantage of this layout was that the new road would have
been severely constricted at its southern end by the projecting garden of No. 1 Cambridge Place. It was nevertheless approved by the Board of Works, as was the street
name submitted by the developers—Prince of Wales Terrace. (fn. a) But in March 1862 the original plan was scrapped,
being replaced by the present inverted T layout. It was
still intended to have twenty-four houses, eight along each
of the three street fronts, but, with Yeo's consent, the
number was later reduced to twenty-two. (ref. 14)
As the development got under way Cawley moved his
address to Kensington, first to No. 6 Abingdon Villas, and
then, in 1864, to a house adjoining the building site itself
at No. 1 Cambridge Place. (ref. 15)
The first houses to be erected were Nos. 1, 3 and 5,
on the west side of Prince of Wales Terrace. These were
built in 1862 and the rest of the houses on this side by
1864. The east side was built between 1863 and 1864, and
the south side in 1865. When completed the houses were
leased by Yeo either to Cawley or his nominees, some of
whom were the first occupants. (ref. 16)
It is not known who designed these houses. The most
obvious candidate is Cawley's surveyor, Philip Wilkinson
(c. 1826–1906), a rather obscure architect whose most
ambitious work was Brodsworth Hall in Yorkshire, built
in 1861–3. Wilkinson was almost certainly responsible for
providing the street layout and he acted on Cawley's behalf
in all dealings with the Metropolitan Board of Works. But
Prince of Wales Terrace is not mentioned in the list of
works which he himself submitted with his nomination
papers for a Fellowship of the R.I.B.A. in 1890, although
this does include some fairly indifferent examples of speculative housing in the Paddington and Bayswater areas. (ref. 17)
The only other architect's name associated with this
development is that of Charles Fowler the younger, to
whom Cawley mortgaged some of the leases, (ref. 18) but there
is no evidence that he had anything other than a purely
financial interest in the work.
Figure 40:
Prince of Wales Terrace, elevation. Thomas Cawley, builder, 1862–5
The houses themselves are lofty four-storey buildings
over basements, with fully stuccoed, rather showy, elevations in the Italianate manner (Plate 46a–c, figs. 40, 41).
But the roofscape shows the influence of the up-to-date
French style with steeply pitched roofs of various-shaped
slates, gabled dormers, and iron cresting work, much of
which has now been lost. The houses are three windows
wide except at the five corner sites (Nos. 1, 2, 13, 14 and
15) which have double-fronted houses. Some noteworthy
details are the heavy iron railings protecting the front
areas, the keystones decorated with female heads above
over the ground-floor windows, and the Prince of Wales
feathers, modelled in high relief, above the first-floor
windows.
The tight planning of the site left no room for any
gardens, either private or communal, or for a mews, but
the lack of these amenities does not appear to have had
an adverse effect on sales. One possible consequence is that
the backs of the houses, which on the east side abut directly
on Victoria Road and on the south side loom over Cambridge Place, have fully stuccoed elevations and a more
‘finished’ appearance than might have been the case if they
had backed on to gardens or a mews (Plates 46a, 55a).
Contemporary information about the interiors (now
very much altered) has not been found, but a schedule
of proposed repairs at No. 14 in 1903 provides a list of
the rooms at a time when the house was still in single family
occupation. (ref. 19) Forty years after its construction this large
double-fronted house was found to be ‘fairly built’, but
the finishings were considered poor, and the sanitary
arrangements and drainage ‘as faulty and badly arranged
as they can be’. The accommodation comprised some
twenty rooms. The three upper floors (including the attic)
were given over almost entirely to bedrooms, of which
there were eleven in all. There was a bathroom fitted with
a zinc bath on the third floor, and water closets on the
landings. The first floor was occupied by two large
drawing-rooms. On the ground floor there was a large
dining-room, a morning-room, a lavatory and a water
closet, and a tiled entrance hall heated by hot-water coils
and fitted with a dinner lift from the basement. The staircase was of stone up to the second floor. The basement
contained a stone-paved kitchen, scullery, larder, housekeeper's room, butler's pantry, coal and wine cellars, store
rooms and a water closet. By this date (1903) a small conservatory had been erected over the entrance, in compensation perhaps for the absence of any garden. It survives
to this day.
A few houses were inhabited from 1864, and the rest
mostly by 1867. But Nos. 2 and 13 (two of the doublefronted houses) and Nos. 21 and 22, at the west end of
the south side, remained vacant until 1870 and 1871. The
presence of a Viscount and a Duke's son among the first
residents was as good an advertisement as could be hoped
for. (ref. 20)
Figure 41:
Prince of Wales Terrace, detail of first-floor window-dressing
Except for No. 6, the lease of which was bought by the
first occupant in 1864 for £3,000, the original selling price
of the houses is not known. (ref. 21)
The purchaser of that house was the artist Edward
Henry Corbould, who had previously occupied No. 52
Victoria Road, where he had his studio (see page 142). Corbould nevertheless retained his Victoria Road studio, giving that address rather than Prince of Wales Terrace when
exhibiting his paintings. (ref. 22) Another of the first inhabitants
was the writer Lord William Pitt Lennox (the Duke's son
already mentioned), who lived at No. 8 from 1865 to 1871. (ref. 3)
More typical of the early residents, however, was the
lawyer Edward Bellasis at No. 22, who was one of six
members of the legal profession occupying houses in
Prince of Wales Terrace at the time of the 1871 census. (ref. 23)
Of the other householders at that time four were members
or former members of the armed forces, and seven had
private incomes. The majority of the householders (sixteen
out of twenty-one) were aged over fifty, and only one was
under forty. He was Henry Francis Makins, a twenty-nine-year-old ‘student-at-law’, and the first occupant of
No. 19 in 1867. It was while he was living at No. 19 that
Makins commissioned J. J. Stevenson to design him one
of the first houses in London in the revolutionary ‘Queen
Anne’ style, at No. 8 Palace Gate. (ref. 24)
In 1871 the average household in Prince of Wales Terrace consisted of ten people, of whom five or six were
servants. Ten years later the households were on average
slightly smaller, and the number of servants per house had
declined to between four and five. The largest household
in 1871 was No. 15, one of the double-fronted houses,
which contained twenty-one people: the householder,
George W. Hunt, P.C., M.P., J.P., barrister and landowner, his wife, three sons, five daughters, a governess
and ten servants, of whom two were men. But the households with the largest proportion of living-in servants were
those of Viscount Exmouth at No. 1, and of an elderly
widower, ‘not in any trade or calling’, at No. 4. The former
had seven servants, the latter, ten, the total size of their
respective households being nine and thirteen. (ref. 25)
The houses in Prince of Wales Terrace held out against
subdivision and conversion into flats and hotels longer
than most in this area—notably De Vere Gardens
immediately to the east. Single-family occupation of the
houses continued right up to 1914, the sole exception being
at No. 11 which was converted into three dwellings
c. 1910. After the war subdivision of the houses occurred
with increasing frequency. The Post Office Directory for
1930 shows eight houses subdivided, nine in single family
occupation and one (No. 1) in the hands of a hotel.