CHAPTER VII
Rutland Gardens and South Place
Rutland Gardens was laid out in 1870–1 by Mitchell
Henry, an Anglo-Irish businessman and politician who had
acquired the freehold of the ground a few years earlier. The
small estate was then occupied by two old mansions: Kent
House and Stratheden House. The new development
involved the demolition of Kent House but left Stratheden
House, which was Henry's own London residence. This
house was pulled down about 1900 and replaced by the
blocks of flats comprising Rutland Court.
Development on Henry's estate petered out after the
building in the early 1870s of a new Kent House, a few
smaller houses, and a mews (Kent Yard). In the 1880s and
'90s the remaining vacant sites were bought and partly
built up in connection with South Lodge, a large house on
the strip of ground between Henry's property and the old
floorcloth factory at the corner of Trevor Place and
Knightsbridge. The sites of South Lodge and the factory
are now occupied by offices and housing built in the late
1970s. (The history of the factory is given in Chapter V.)
The development of the area from c. 1770
Until 1862, the ground now occupied by Rutland Gardens,
and the South Lodge site, formed a single freehold property, which in the eighteenth century belonged to a family
named Shakespear. The eastern part, where South Lodge
eventually came to be built, was by the 1760s occupied by a
largish house and some cottages, but the rest of the ground
was undeveloped. (ref. 1) In the early 1770s a large plot on the
west side was leased for the building of the mansion later
called Stratheden House, and the existing house was
rebuilt or improved by the master carpenter and builder
George Shakespear, on a long lease from his relations
William and John Shakespear. (ref. 2) This house was later known
as No. 3 South Place. A third house, the kernel of the future
Kent House, followed in the early 1790s, by which time
George Shakespear had become the freeholder of the
whole estate. On his death, the property passed to his niece
Mary Phillips, the daughter of his brother-in-law and partner John Phillips; she married Shakespear's Pimlico neighbour and trustee, William North, (ref. 3) whose family retained
the land until 1862. No. 3 South Place was then sold to the
sitting tenant, Sir Anthony Sterling, who built South
Lodge over part of the garden at the back of the house. (ref. 4)
The rest of the ground, with Kent House and Stratheden
House, was sold to George Duddell of Albemarle Street,
who disposed of it in November 1863 to Mitchell Henry. (ref. 5)
In April 1864 Henry acquired the short residue of the original leases of Stratheden House and its stabling; the leasehold interest in Kent House he did not acquire until 1866. (ref. 6)
Henry carried out lavish improvements at Stratheden
House before turning his attention to the development of
the Kent House estate. In the summer of 1870 Kent House
was pulled down, and the German-born architect and
decorator Frederick Sang, Henry's interior designer at
Stratheden House, sought approval from the Metropolitan
Board of Works on Henry's behalf for a plan to build a road
(Rutland Gardens) and houses on the site. (ref. 7)
The main-road frontage of the Kent House estate was
divided into three large plots for mansions, but in the event
only the westernmost plot was sold, where work on the
present Kent House began in 1872. Sang entered into an
agreement with Henry to buy the rest of the Kent House
estate, (ref. 8) but a portion of it, at the rear of the new Kent
House, was sold in 1872 to Colonel R. C. S. Clifford for a
'family mansion', together with a plot for stables in what
became Kent Yard. (ref. 9) Sang's purchase was never completed,
though he did build one house in Rutland Gardens –
Rutland Lodge, at the corner of Kent Yard.
Instead of a single mansion, Clifford built a row of four
houses on his ground (Rutland House and Nos 1, 2 and 3
Rutland Gardens), at which point the development stalled.
Apart from the replacement of Stratheden House with
flats, the subsequent nineteenth-century building up of
Rutland Gardens, and of the vacant ground adjoining Kent
House, consisted essentially of improvements to the South
Lodge estate. Rutland Gardens Mews was created as part
of this process.