Raphael Street
Raphael Street was laid out on part of the former estate of
the gunmaker Durs Egg by Lewis Raphael of Hendon, who
bought it from Egg's heirs in 1838. A member of an
affluent Roman Catholic family of Armenian descent,
Raphael was a dairy farmer with a mansion and a splendid
estate at Bush Hill Park, Edmonton.
In November 1843 Raphael entered into a building
agreement with Edward Nangle, builder (later 'surveyor').
Nangle laid out a new road, called Raphael Street, running
from Lancelot Place eastward to Knightsbridge Green,
where it curved southwards to avoid Egg's former house
(fig. 22). (ref. 99)
Nangle's building operations began in 1844, with the
conversion and enlargement of the old house as the Pakenham Tavern, and the erection of terrace-houses along the
north side of the new road. The Pakenham, which took the
address of Knightsbridge Green not Raphael Street, was
perhaps named as a compliment to the Duke of Wellington,
whose wife was a Pakenham. Nangle himself became its
first landlord, in 1848, when at his direction the pub was
leased to the brewers Elliot & Watney of Pimlico. (This was
the only house on the estate to be leased to Nangle or his
nominees.)
With the exception of two houses, Nos 10 and 11, the
north side of Raphael Street was completed by 1847 and
mostly occupied over the next two or three years. The sites
of Nos 10 and 11, somewhat larger than the rest, were
probably left at the time with a view to a future roadway as
part of development on the Rose and Crown or the neighbouring Dungannon Cottage properties. (ref. 100)
On the south side of the street and the corner of
Lancelot Place, Nangle got into difficulties, probably as a
consequence of the widespread depression at that time,
and development was halted, leaving six houses still only
partly built. Several years later, in March 1849, Nangle
gave notice that he was resuming work on two, but does not
appear to have completed them: at the time he was being
pursued in court for debt. (ref. 101)
Further activity in Raphael Street took place in 1852–3
with the erection of a row of five shops (which became Nos
33–37) on the shallow plots opposite the Pakenham. They
were the work of a Kensington builder, Francis J. Attfield.
Another builder, George Day of New Kent Road, was
responsible for the remainder of the south side of the
street, built up in 1854–5, and Nos 10 and 11 on the north
side, built in 1854. Both Attfield and Day were presumably
working under contract not as speculators, for in August
1853 all their houses and Nangle's (apart from the Pakenham), together with the Rose and Crown property, were
leased directly by Raphael's heirs to a West End solicitor,
Frederick William Dolman, to whom Nangle had mortgaged his interest in the estate in 1847. (ref. 102)
Nangle's houses were of three storeys over half-basements, two windows wide, with stuccoed ground-floor
fronts and iron balconettes at the first-floor windows (Plate
52a). Day's houses, on shorter plots, were built close to the
pavement edge, with gratings to light the basements or cellars. They had stuccoed window surrounds and roundarched entrances. The Pakenham Tavern was large and
showy; its curved and fully stuccoed façade was echoed
across the road by Attfield's shops (Plate 52b, 52c).
On the corner of Lancelot Place, Nos 19 and 20 were
later knocked together to form the Royal Oak public house.
From the beginning the houses of Raphael Street were in
multi-occupancy, the tenants including many grooms and
coachmen, as well as soldiers, clerks and domestic servants. (ref. 103) By the early 1860s the respectability of the street
was threatened by the popularity of several singing and
dancing venues near by, including the Pakenham Tavern,
where 'Free and Easy' musical evenings were prone to lead
to disturbances and fights. Householders complained that
respectable early rising workpeople were giving up their
lodgings because of the noise. (ref. 104)
Arnold Bennett lodged in Raphael Street around 1890,
in his early days in London, as did the hero of his first
novel, A Man From the North (1898).
In the twentieth century, if not earlier, many of the houses were overcrowded, dilapidated and insanitary, attracting
the attention of Westminster City Council. (ref. 105) Boarding– or
lodging-houses continued to dominate. 'Very handy for
poor but respectable gentlemen like myself,' says a character, not without irony, in a novel of 1926, 'Single ladies not
taken without luggage and references. Very good address
for out-of-work actors or lady typists … Almost as good as
Rutland Gate, if you don't happen to have seen the cards in
the windows'. (ref. 106) But many of the 'lodging-houses' were
occupied by prostitutes and prosecutions for brothelkeeping in Raphael Street were frequent. The seediness of
the area was usually blamed on its proximity to the barracks.
The Pakenham and the Raphael Street houses survived
the Second World War largely intact, and were pulled
down about 1956–7 for office development.