Warwick Road north of
West Cromwell Road
Today the character of Warwick Road is largely
determined by its role as a major traffic route. In the
stretch to the north of West Cromwell Road the east side
is dominated by the huge bulk of the Royal Borough's
Central Depot with its impressive mass of noise-reducing
brick walling, while the west side is predominantly a
wasteland of car parks and yards and other car-related
businesses. This side of the road was always associated
with transport activities, firstly in connection with the
Kensington Canal Basin and its associated wharves, warehouses and counting-houses, one or two of which survive,
and later with the railway sidings and coal depot which
were located here. There was, however, also a substantial
quantity of domestic housing, much of it designed to
accommodate those who worked in this little hub of commercial and industrial activity. Of the original houses, only
three short terraces on the east side remain, but new housing complexes have recently been erected on top of the
Central Depot, and no less than four public houses still
survive in the street to testify to one of the basic needs
of its once large residential and working population.
The northern end of the street was laid out as early as
1822, and for a short period it was called Moiety Road
because it divided the two parcels of land which were taken
under building agreements in that year for the erection of Warwick Square (now Warwick Gardens) and Kensington Crescent respectively. Some development took place
in the street almost immediately and spread very gradually
southwards over several decades. In 1890 the whole street
was renumbered from south to north, and, for the sake
of convenience, the succeeding account follows the direction taken by the street numbers rather than the chronological sequence of building.
East Side
Nos. 80–100 (even) Warwick Road are all that remain of
a group of over a hundred small houses or cottages which
were built hereabouts for a mainly artisan population in
the 1850s and 1860s. Most of these dwellings were on the
west side of the street, and their history is described below.
Of the surviving houses, Nos. 94–100, which have two
storeys above a basement and are faced in stock brick with
plain stucco dressings, are the oldest and were erected in
1855 by William Handby of Pembridge Place, builder. (ref. 372)
Originally this terrace consisted of six houses, but the two
northernmost, Nos. 102 and 104, were demolished in
about 1972 for the rebuilding of the borough council's
Central Depot. No. 92 was added to this terrace by
Handby about 1864, though not leased to him until
1867. (ref. 373) He lived there himself and in 1871, when he was
sixty-five years old, he shared the house with a fancy warehouseman's assistant and also accommodated two lodgers
in his part of the premises. (ref. 374)
Nos. 80–90 were erected in 1868 under building leases
granted to Henry Kingham of High Street, Notting Hill. (ref. 375)
Usually described as a confectioner and sometimes as a
builder, Kingham was an entrepreneur who was responsible for the erection of a large number of small terraced
houses in the vicinity, including several in the streets to
the west of Warwick Road. His houses here are unusual
in being faced with red brick, a material which at that time
was considered suitable for the dwellings of artisans or
advanced artists but not for the houses of the respectable
middle class. No. 80 (Cromwell House), which has its
entrance in West Cromwell Road, has three full storeys
above a basement and a hipped roof, while Nos. 82–90
have only two main storeys (Plate 115c), to which low
attics have recently been added during rehabilitation by
the Family Housing Association as part of a project which
included the conversion into flats of Nos. 68–94 (even)
West Cromwell Road (see page 288).
To the north of No. 100 the borough's vast Central
Depot, which was erected in 1972–5, has a frontage of over
550 feet to Warwick Road divided into two blocks by the
roadway of Pembroke Road and the Kensington Arms
public house on its north-west corner. The site to the south
of Pembroke Road at one time formed part of the extensive
premises of Erards, the piano manufacturers, and its early
history is described on page 280. The part of the site to
the north of the Kensington Arms was originally occupied
by some twenty small terraced houses (Plate 113a). Of
these, No. 110, a two-storey house with a plain stuccoed
façade, still survives, but it was built on part of the
curtilage of the Kensington Arms and is not typical of the
three-storey houses to its north which have been demolished. The first of these to be built, latterly numbered 124–134 and 138–148 (even) Warwick Road, were erected in
1845–7 by the contractor Thomas Earle, who was also
shortly to develop part of Warwick Gardens (see page
266). (ref. 376) They formed two ranges of six houses each with
a passageway to a gravel pit between them. When the
gravel pit was subsequently built over, another houses,
No. 136, was erected on the site of the passageway in about
1859. (ref. 377) To the south of Earle's houses another six stucco
fronted houses, Nos. 112–122 (even), were erected under
building leases granted in June 1853 by Lord Kensington
to James and Samuel Williams of Shepherd's Bush, contractors. (ref. 378) The Williamses also built the Kensington
Arms, the lease of which was granted to them in November
1852. (ref. 379) A large public house with a surprisingly full
panoply of italianate dressings for its date (Plate 113a),
the Kensington Arms has now lost the elaborate
centrepiece and ball finials from above its parapet and the
interior has been denuded of any features of interest.
James and Samuel Williams also erected two houses on
the north side of Pembroke Road to the east of the Kensington Arms and entered into an agreement with Lord
Kensington to lay out a mews in the triangular space
between the backs of the houses in Warwick Road, Pembroke Road and Warwick Gardens. They had begun work
on this when, in 1863, the Kensington Vestry advertised
for a suitable site for a depot to store stone and other
materials, and the Williamses decided to offer this plot.
After some negotiation, the Vestry paid them £1,000 for
the site and £150 for the materials and structures on the
ground. Lord Kensington, somewhat reluctantly agreeing
to the change of use, granted the Vestry an eighty-five-year
lease from 1863 at a rent of £50 per annum (£20 more
than he would have received if the original proposal to
build stables had been carried out). (ref. 380) In 1864 some buildings were erected including a house at the entrance from
Pembroke Road for the depot's superintendent or foreman
which also served as an office. (ref. 381)
In 1877 a part of the site of Erards' piano factory with
a frontage to Warwick Road was purchased for £3,000 by
the Vestry for the erection of stabling to be used in connection with the depot. This particular plot had originally
been occupied by the Warwick Farm Dairy, which had
been built by Stephen Bird in 1848 and had been annexed
to the factory premises in about 1866 (see page 280). Some
of the former dairy buildings were still usable, and new
stabling was also erected in 1877 and 1879. (ref. 382) According
to the census of 1881 no fewer than 283 men were then
employed at the ‘Kensington Vestry Stables’, perhaps at
both sites. (ref. 383)
In 1892, after the piano factory had closed down, the
Vestry decided to expand its depot by taking a lease of
the ground on the north and east sides of its stables at a rent of £250 per annum, and thus acquired an enlarged
site with a frontage of 200 feet to Warwick Road and nearly
300 feet to Pembroke Road, in addition to its original
premises on the north side of Pembroke Road. (ref. 384)
The freehold of the original depot site was purchased
by Kensington Council for £1,600 in 1904, and shortly
afterwards proposals were made to improve the facilities
here. In 1912 £4,000 was paid for the freehold of
Nos. 112–122 (even) Warwick Road, which were then
occupied as tenements at weekly rentals, most of the
tenants being considerably in arrears with their rents, and
in 1913–14 these houses were demolished and new buildings erected for the depot with their main entrance from
Warwick Road at a cost of some £6,500. A residence for
one of the foremen of the depot was built next to the new
entrance as part of the scheme. (ref. 385)
These much-enlarged premises to the north and south
of Pembroke Road sufficed until 1965 when the newly
formed Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea decided
to reorganize its depot accommodation by rebuilding the
whole depot in Warwick Road. Nos. 124–148 (even)
Warwick Road and subsequently Nos. 102 and 104 and
adjacent premises were acquired for demolition, and the
architects, engineers and quantity surveyors, Arup Associates, were appointed to prepare a scheme which would
include some housing accommodation. Their plans were
approved in 1970 and work began in 1972, the builders
being John Mowlem and Company at a tendered price of
£2,729,528. The depot was completed in 1975 and the
associated housing in the following year. (ref. 386)
Externally the new depot complex has long frontages
of high stock-brick curtain walling and two to four storeys
of terraced flats above, the lowest level being cantilevered
out from the main wall surface (Plate 115d). The depot
itself is of reinforced concrete construction, and the
southern block contains a vast transport workshop with
an area of over 2,400 square metres, its roof supported
by a massive central column and sixteen radiating beams.
This roof in turn forms the base of a paved and landscaped
‘garden square’, named Chesterton Square, around which
flats and maisonettes, faced with the same stock brickwork,
are arranged on three and four storeys (Plate 115c). The
northern block of the depot, which is basically triangular
in shape, contains parking facilities and another high-level
landscaped area called Broadwood Terrace (fn. a) with two and
three storeys of flats on the Warwick Road perimeter. The
blocks are joined by a striking open tubular steel bridge
over Pembroke Road with walkways on two levels.
The chief element of the design is the conjunction of
the austere and even forbidding mass of the depot with
the intimate scale of the housing around spacious and well
planted enclosures, especially in Chesterton Square. The
housing itself is simple and unassertive, and the setting
provides a remarkable degree of peace and seclusion in
a particularly noisy part of Kensington.
Even before the new depot was completed the Council
realized that it would still be short of space for all its
vehicles, and in 1975 a decision was taken to purchase the
redundant depositories of John Barker and Company to
the east of the southern site. The cost of acquisition and
conversion, for which Arup Associates were also the architects, amounted to some £1,600,000. Among the work
carried out was the demolition of the southern block of
the former piano factory. (ref. 387)
To the north of the depot is a surviving group of three
storeyed late-Georgian houses, Nos. 150–160 (even)
Warwick Road, with a stuccoed public house at each end
and four brick-faced houses with shops or offices on the
ground floor in between. The Warwick Arms at No. 160
was indeed the first building to be erected in the road
under a building lease which was granted in February 1823
by Lord Kensington to George Benson of The Terrace,
a painter, for ninety-eight years at a rent of £25 per annum.
The intended public house was given the name Warwick
Arms in the lease (after the Earls of Warwick and Holland
who once owned the Edwardes estate) and this was shortly
afterwards extended to the row of houses in the form of
Warwick Place and eventually to the whole street. The
public house was completed by 1828 when Benson himself
was the ratepayer. In that year he took out a second mortgage of the premises from the brewers Combe and Dela
field, but in the following year he assigned his lease to
Thompson, Wood and Fuller of Chiswick, brewers, the
forerunners of Fuller, Smith and Turner, and the public
house has remained in their possession ever since. (ref. 388)
Externally the Warwick Arms has a rendered façade above
the ground storey, and inside there is much plain woodwork. At the rear the rough place bricks of the internal
walls have been exposed in a modern decorative scheme.
The other houses in the terrace were leased to Benson,
or in the case of Nos. 154–156 at his direction to Matthew
Sherborn of Oxford Street, oil and colourman, between
1825 and 1829, but they were not completed until 1834. (ref. 389)
No. 150 is now the Britannia Tap public house. It was
a beer house from at least 1863 (ref. 301) and was purchased by
William Wells and Company, in 1889. It is now owned
by Young and Company, having been bought by them in
1924 (see page 114),. and was once said to be the smallest
public house in London, but it has recently been extended
and altered, both externally and internally. (ref. 390)
The short cul-de-sac to the north of the Warwick Arms
is marked as ‘Chapel Street’ in the plan attached to the
building lease of February 1823 for the public house, and
may have been intended as a way to the chapel which it
was then proposed to build at the south end of the equally
abortive Warwick Square (see page 264). To the north of
this opening was formerly a range of two-storey stables
and coach-houses called Garibaldi Stables. They appear
to have been erected about 1860 by the builder Samuel
Johns in conjunction with houses he was then building
on the west side of Warwick Gardens. Johns also gave the
name Garibaldi Villa to the house he built for himself at
No. 35 Pembroke Gardens.
Figure 117:
Shaftesbury Cottages, Fenelon Place, 1852–4,
Plan and elevation.Demolished
West Side
The development of the area between the Kensington
Canal and Warwick Road to the south of the canal basin
began shortly after the Great Exhibition of 1851, when
a Kensington resident, Henry Benjamin Kent, erected two
model cottages, each containing four flats, to a simplified
version of the design of Prince Albert's model lodging
houses which had been built for the Exhibition. Kent's
cottages, which were probably begun in 1852 and at least
partially occupied by 1854, (ref. 391) were named Shaftesbury
Cottages, (ref. 392) alter the philanthropist Antony Ashley
Cooper, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (Plate 115a, Fig. 117).
The cottages were on the west side of a narrow road which
was laid out parallel to Warwick Road and called Shaftesbury
Road until renamed Fenelon Place in 1939. They
had garden plots both at the rear and across the roadway
in front, and were leased to Kent by Lord Kensington in
1856 for eighty-two years at a total ground rent of £12
per annum. (ref. 393)
Henry Benjamin Kent was then living at No. 1 Holland
Place on the north side of Kensington High Street with
his step-son, the builder and house agent, Frederick William Durrant. In the 1851 census, when aged forty-two,
he had described himself as a retired coal merchant. (ref. 394)
Durrant, who was probably the actual builder of the cottages, appears to have been using part of the ground
hereabouts for brick making. (ref. 36)
The cottages must have been erected under an informal
arrangement with the second Lord Kensington, and Kent
also began to build some houses in the vicinity (ref. 395) before
entering into a building agreement with the third Lord
Kensington in May 1855 to develop the whole area as far
south as a new road which was to be formed on the line of the present extension of West Cromwell Road. By the
terms of this agreement houses were to be erected on the
north side of this road (initially called Alma Road after
the current fashion of adopting names from the Crimean
War, before being renamed Fenelon Road in 1871 for
unknown reasons) and on the west side of Warwick Road,
while the group of model cottages was evidently intended
to be extended to the north and south. Another range of
small houses was to be built on the edge of the canal towing
path, fronting on to a narrow road parallel to the canal. (ref. 396)
When eventually erected the latter houses were called Ashley Cottages. The total ground rent for the whole plot,
including Shaftesbury Cottages, was only £80 per
annum, (ref. 397) and most of this was off-loaded on to other
builders by Kent.
The range of houses along Warwick Road was called
Shaftesbury Terrace, and the first eight of these were built
by Durrant and leased to him by Lord Kensington at
Kent's direction in 1855–6. (ref. 398) Durrant also took a sublease from Kent of a house in Alma Road, (ref. 399) but several
other builders were also involved in the development during the late 1850s and early 1860s, mainly as sub-lessees
of Kent, (fn. b) and building proceeded at a somewhat desultory
pace. After September 1863 all of the sub-leases were
granted by Kent to Henry Kingham of High Street, Notting Hill, usually described as a confectioner but sometimes as a builder. Kingham erected terraced houses on
the west side of Shaftesbury Road (later Fenelon Place,
Plate 115a) to north and south of the model cottages, in
an apparent change of plan, (ref. 401) and also built a number
of small houses and a public house (the Royal Arms) in
1868–70 on the south side of Alma Road under direct
leases from Lord Kensington (this side of the road not
having been included in the area covered by Kent's building agreement). (ref. 402) The last seven houses in this terrace
were leased in 1870 to William Henry Kingham of
Hornton Street, builder, presumbly a relative, to whom
Henry Kingham appears to have handed over building
operations at about that time. (ref. 403)
(fn. c) Ashley Cottages appear
to have been built directly for Kent in the 1860s, by which
time the West London Extension Railway had been constructed along the former course of the canal.
Henry Benjamin Kent retired to Dulwich, where he
died in 1887 with a personal estate worth over £10,500,
which would have included the value of any leasehold
property he had retained. (ref. 405)
The pattern of occupancy of this enclave of workingclass housing is shown in the detailed returns of the census
of 1871. (ref. 406) The 120 occupied houses in the area to the
south of the railway sidings on the west side of Warwick
Road and the piano factory on the east were inhabited on
census night by 967 persons (almost exactly eight per
house) in 243 separate households. Two houses, one on
the north side of Fenelon (formerly Alma) Road and one
in Shaftesbury Road, had seventeen occupants divided
between three and four households respectively. The
heads of these households were a railway ticket collector,
who put up five lodgers (all railway workers) with his
family, a brewery traveller and a carman in the first house,
and a decorator's labourer, a blacksmith, a labourer, and
a coachman in the second. Even the small Ashley Cottages
were sometimes multi-occupied, but the flats in the model
cottages housed only a single family each with the exception of one which was shared by a laundress and a
seamstress and their dependants. The most common single
occupation was that of labourer, but other building workers and tradesmen (apart from those labourers who would
have worked in the building industry) formed the largest
occupational group. Several inhabitants were railway
workers of one kind or another, while there were eight coal
porters, and some of the labourers may also have worked
at the coal depot further to the north in Warwick Road.
Four pianoforte-makers and one tuner almost certainly
worked at Erards, as did a porter who specified that he
was employed there, and probably the five French
polishers and some of the cabinet-makers and joiners who
lived in the area.
No. 3 Shaftesburty Terrace (later No. 175 Warwick
Road) was the residence of Leah Lee when she married
the French poet Jules Laforgue on the last day of 1886.
He came over from Paris on that morning and the marriage
took place at St. Barnabas's, Addison Road, with Leah's
landlady as one of the witnesses. (ref. 407)
The houses on each side of Fenelon Road were demolished shortly before the war of 1939–45 for the widening
of the approach to the new bridge that was then being
constructed over the railway as part of the West Cromwell
Road extension. Prefabricated houses were erected on the
vacant ground on the north side shortly after the end of
the war. In 1951 an article about Shaftesbury Cottages
could still speak in somewhat idyllic terms of ‘cottage
gardens, sweet with briar roses, and tangled blackberry shoots that creep along the gravel path‘, (ref. 393) but five years
later a medical officer of health appointed by the L.C.C.
reported that the remaining houses in the area were unfit
for human habitation and the Council declared it a
Clearance Area. (ref. 408) Over the next four years all of the
houses on the west side of Warwick Road and in Fenelon
Place and Ashley Cottages were emptied and demolished.
The former lock-keeper's cottage of the Kensington Canal
survives (see page 326), but is now boarded-up. A short
distance to its north is a two-storey district surveyor's
office which was erected in 1961. (ref. 409)
To the north of this former residential area the west
side of Warwick Road was originally occupied by the ware houses and counting houses of the companies which had
wharves on the Kensington Canal Basin. Apart from some
tumbledown brick structures, the only survivors of these
are Nos. 187 and 189, the latter two-storeyed with a
rendered exterior, probably dating from the early 1850s. (ref. 410)
Of the later small single-storey offices which were built
for the numerous coal merchants and other tradesmen who
used the depot and railway goods yards, Nos. 189A–191
and 199–209 (odd) remain. More recent buildings are a
four-storey garage, showrooms, workshop and offices at
Nos. 181–183, built in 1962–3 to the desings of Wallis,
Gilbert and Partners, (ref. 411) the four-storey West Kensington
Telephone Exchange, erected in 1962 to the designs of
G. R. Yeats of the Ministry of Public Buildings and
Works, (ref. 412) and Warwick House, a three-storey block of flats
(now derelict), built c. 1952 as married soldiers' quarters
for the territorial army centre which occupied the sit of
the coal depot for a short period after the war of
1939–45. (ref. 301)
North of the coal depot was another small group of some
fifteen houses which were erected in two phases, in the
1830s and 1860s, and which were known by such names
as Lily Terrace, Wallis Cottages and Radnor Villas. They
were mostly demolished in the 1930s, the only survivor
being the Radnor Arms, a three-storeyed public house
faced with stock bricks and restrained Italianate dressings
which was erected in 1862, probably to the designs of
Josiah Houle, architect, of Guilford Street, St. Pancras, (ref. 413)
who was later to be much involved in rebuildings on the
south side of Kensington High Street (see pages 84 and
87).
West Cromwell Road
On 17 February 1869 the third Lord Kensington signed
an agreement with the builder Thomas Huggett to develop
six acres of the estate between Earl's Court Road and
Warwick Road to the south of the mews which is now
called Logan Place. The development was to be centred
on a new road which would link the recently extended
Cromwell Road to Alma (later Fenelon) Road with access
roads to north and south on the line of the present Cromwell Crescent and Nevern Road and to the south only at
Templeton Place. (ref. 414) The main road was originally considered to be a further extension of Cromwell Road, but
was given the separate name of West Cromwell Road in
1873.
Huggett began by building on the frontage to Earl's
Court Road, where he erected two terraces of five houses
each to the north and south of West Cromwell Road.
These were set back from the main road behind small plan tations and were originally named West Cromwell
Gardens. (ref. 415) The southern terrace has been demolished and
the northern, now Nos. 130–138 (even) Earl's Court Road,
is presently being largely rebuilt behind the existing
façades.
Building then proceeded quite steadily and quickly
westwards along West Cromwell Road, all of the building
leases except one being granted directly to Huggett by the
third and fourth Barons Kensington between 1869 and
1874. (ref. 416) (The exception was the lease of No. 45 which was
granted on Huggett's direction to the first occupant, a
‘Student of the Inner Temple’. (ref. 417) ) The development
seems to have been substantially complete by 1876, (ref. 301) and
consisted of 120 houses. These were all similar and of the
most standard Italianate variety with semi-basements,
three main storeys and garrets, and predominantly brickfaced with stucco dressings, Doric porticoes and bay
windows up to the first floor.
Where West Cromwell Road joined the already-existing
north-south roadway between the houses in Pembroke
Road and the Erard piano factory (then unofficially known
as Edwardes Road (ref. 418) ) Huggett laid out an intersection with
convex-curved street frontages. He called this intersection,
somewhat inappropriately, Cromwell Crescent, and the
houses on the curved frontages were numbered in the
Crescent. By a street-naming order of 1937, however, the
name Cromwell Crescent was re-applied, equally inap propriately, to the whole roadway between Pembroke
Road and West Cromwell Road, and of the surviving
houses here only Nos. 1–9 (consec.) Cromwell Crescent
have retained their original numbering, Nos. 10–13
becoming Nos. 58–64 (even) West Cromwell Road. At the
same time the former Nos. 58–86 (even) West Cromwell
Road were renumbered as 66–94 (even). The houses num bered in Cromwell Crescent on the south side of West
Cromwell Road were renumbered either as part of the latter road or in Nevern Road, but all have now been
demolished.
Surviving groups of deeds for three of Huggett's houses
provide some evidence of his methods of financing his
operations. Shortly after receiving his leases of these
houses he mortgaged them to various private individuals,
usually for sums in the region of £700, to which further
small sums might be added. Some of his mortgagees came
from the West Country, apparently through his use of a
firm of solicitors, Newman and Lyon, with connections
there. In 1875–6 he sold the houses for £1,200, £1,200
and £1,500, receiving respectively £300, £350 and £800
above the amounts he owed on mortgage. In two instances
the purchasers who had contracted to buy the houses from
Huggett sold them again immediately at profits of £150
and £100. (ref. 419)
As these prices would indicate, Huggett was catering
for a solidly middle-class market. The occupants of the
eighteen houses in West Cromwell Road which had been
completed by the time the 1871 census was taken included
stockbrokers, owners of house-property and land, senior
clerks in the Civil Service, merchants, members of the professions and officers of the armed services, mostly retired,
but including one lieutenant on the active list aged thirty
who had four servants. Most households had two servants,
but some had three or four. (ref. 420)
The writer and publisher Leonard Woolf, who was the
son of a barrister, was born at No. 72 (later No. 80) in
1880, but his parents shortly afterwards moved to a new
house in Lexham Gardens (see page 299). (ref. 421)
Huggett himself occupied No. 4 West Cromwell Road
briefly before moving c. 1874 to another house he had just
completed at No. 9 Cromwell Crescent. He continued to
live there until his sudden death at the age of sixty-two
in 1899. By then he was a prominent vestryman and a
member of the London School Board, and had sent his
only son to Oxford. (ref. 422) When his will was proved early in
1900 The Kensington News commented: ‘A good many
people opened their eyes when they read that the late Mr.
Thomas Huggett had left by will a sum of £81,000, the
exact amount of his wealth being probably another
£20,000. It must not be forgotten, however, that the
deceased commenced building at the right time [about
1860], when land was far cheaper than now, and that he
erected just the sort of houses that were sure to let. Mr.
Huggett also possessed a quantity of small property, and
took good care to be his own rent collector. Although considered to be a retired builder, he was practically in business until his death. He kept a small staff of men, and at
his private residence a part of the basement was stored
with chimney-pots, paint-pots, wall-paper, and other
materials required in the repair of house property’. (ref. 423)
In 1901 No. 69 West Cromwell Road, which had been
bought for £1,600 in 1876, was sold for £875, with sixtyseven years of its lease still to run, and in 1919 No. 52,
which had cost its purchaser £1,350 in 1876, was sold for
£525. (ref. 424) By this time some houses were listed in directories
as ‘residential chambers’ and others were boardinghouses, and in 1922 at least one house was being let in
separate flats at weekly rents. (ref. 425) Further decline in the
status of the street occurred after the war of 1939–45 when
it became part of a major east-west traffic route, and the
houses were either turned into small hotels or divided into
bed-sitting-rooms and flats.
The history of this road improvement is long and complicated. The construction of a bridge over the West
London Extension Railway with approach roads linking
West Cromwell Road to Talgarth Road in Fulham was
mooted very shortly after those roads were themselves laid
out. In 1884 a private Act of Parliament was passed to
enable the builders Gibbs and Flew, who were developing
the area to the west of the railway, to build the bridge.
The firm went into liquidation before it could carry out
its plans, however, and although the proposal was raised
again at frequent intervals, an inability to reconcile the
various interests (and contributions) of vestries, councils,
private landowners and the government delayed its
implementation. Finally in 1935 the London County
Council and the Middlesex County Council co-operated
in drawing up a scheme, and the government agreed to
meet 60 per cent of the cost. An Act authorizing the project
was passed in 1936 and all of the houses in Fenelon Road
and some in Shaftesbury Road (later Fenelon Place) and
Warwick Road were demolished shortly afterwards. The
bridge over the railway was completed by December 1941,
and in the following year the approach roads which had
replaced Fenelon Road to the east of the bridge and Conan
Street, Fulham, to the west were officially renamed as part
of West Cromwell Road. (ref. 426)
The original section of West Cromwell Road which had
been laid out by Huggett was only sixty feet wide while
both the bridge and its approach roads and Cromwell Road
itself were eighty feet wide. As the amount of traffic using
the new east-west route grew, the variation in width began
to pose problems, and in 1967 the Greater London Council
approved a scheme for widening this section of the road.
All of the houses built by Huggett on the south side of
the street and in the roads leading out of its south side
were demolished in 1971–2, and the roadway of West
Cromwell Road was made into a dual carriageway. (ref. 427)
In 1977–81 Nos. 68–94 (even) West Cromwell Road
were rehabilitated and converted into flats for the Family
Housing Association. Six-storey blocks of flats were built
behind the façades of Nos. 68–92 with their principal
access at the rear, while No. 94 (Latham Court) was completely rebuilt as a red-brick block of flats with the same
external appearance as those at the rear of the houses.
Nos. 80–90 (even) Warwick Road were also included in
this scheme, which was carried out under the direction
of Barry J. Martin and Partners, chartered surveyors. (ref. 428)