CHAPTER XIV - The Potteries, Bramley Road Area, and the
Rise of the Housing Problem in
North Kensington
Between the Ladbroke and Norland
estates there extended northward from the
Uxbridge road a lane which provided
access to the half-dozen fields between the northern
boundary of the Norland estate and the southern
boundary of Notting Barns Farm (later the
St. Quintin estate). In the eighteenth century this
lane was known as Green's Lane, perhaps from
the Greene family, then the owners of the Norland
estate, but after the establishment of tile
and pottery kilns near the northern part of the lane
in the first half of the nineteenth century, it
became known as Pottery Lane. The site of the
southern part of the lane is now occupied by the
southern part of Portland Road. From the mid
1830's onwards the south-eastern part of the
district served by the lane was commonly referred
to as the Potteries (fig. 90), and after the cholera
epidemic of 1848–9 the conditions of filth, disease
and insanitation in which its inhabitants were
found to be living and dying gave the area a
notoriety perhaps unsurpassed by any other
district in London.
The Potteries are situated on the flat, lowlying,
stiff clay ground at the bottom of the hill
now surmounted by St. John's Church. According
to Mary Bayly, authoress of Ragged Homes and
How to Mend Them (1859), the first migrant to
this desolate place was Samuel Lake, whose noxious
trades of scavenging and chimney-sweeping
compelled him, in the early years of the nineteenth
century, to remove from his premises in Tottenham
Court Road to a more solitary spot. He took
a lease of land off Green's Lane, and there he was
soon joined by one Stephens, a bow-string maker,
who was compelled to remove for the same reason
as Lake. When building development began on
the Bishop of London's estates in Paddington in
the 1820's the pig-keepers of Tyburnia also had to
find a new home. Stephens himself changed over
to this trade, and soon a little colony of pig-keepers
had established itself in the district. Meanwhile
some sixteen acres of adjoining land to the west
were being dug for brick earth by Stephen Bird,
one of the principal brickmakers in London and
also a builder active in Kensington; and with the
arrival of the potters several of the principal ingredients
for the making of the hideous future of
the district were already present. (ref. 1)
The manufacture of pottery appears to have
been established here before 1827 by Ralph
Adams (ref. 2) of Gray's Inn Road, brick- and tilemaker,
who between 1826 and 1831 was the
building lessee for most of the houses in Holland
Park Avenue between Ladbroke Grove and Portland
Road, the earth for the bricks having been no
doubt dug from the Potteries area. The ratebooks
first refer to this locality as 'the Potteries' in 1833.
The tithe map of 1844 shows what appears to be a
kiln on the east side of Pottery Lane near the
present No. 34. The only kiln shown on the
Ordnance Survey map surveyed in 1863 is that
which still stands on the east side of Walmer Road
opposite to Avondale Park (Plate 36b). (fn. a) The
Adams family's business was chiefly concerned
with the production of drain-pipes, tiles and
flower-pots, and in 1856 it was said that 'there
seems to be no other manufactory of the kind
in the neighbourhood'. (ref. 4)
Until the establishment of the Office of Metropolitan
Buildings in 1844 there was no public
control whatever over standards of building in
Kensington, and in the absence of any private
supervision by the ground landlord either, sheds
and shanties of the most deplorable kind could be
erected with impunity. As early as 1838 conditions
at the Potteries had already attracted the
vigilant eye of the Poor Law Commissioners,
who stated that some of the cottages there were
actually built over stagnant pools of water. 'In
some instances the floors have given way, and rest
at one end of the room in the stagnant pool, while
the other end, being still dry, contains the bed or
straw mattress on which the family sleep.' (ref. 5) The
formidable combination of large quantities of
semi-liquid pig manure and other organic matter
with the great cavities dug by the potters and the
brickmakers, all in an area anyway difficult to
drain, provided problems which the Westminster
Commissioners of Sewers were incapable of solving.
To the complaints which they received from
1834 onwards from the parish poor law authorities
and adjoining property owners they replied that
the drainage channel at the Potteries 'was a private
Ditch and not under the control of the Commissioners',
and when Richard Roy, the principal
building promoter on the adjoining part of the
Ladbroke estate, who also owned a small piece of
land in the Potteries, called their attention in
1845 'to the disgraceful and neglected state' of the
district, he was curtly told that 'he must himself
take measures for the proper drainage of his
property'. (ref. 6)
Figure 90:
The Potteries and Bramley Road area. Hatching denotes the
'Avernus' or Notting Dale Special Area. Based on the Ordnance Survey
In December 1847, when fear of an outbreak
of cholera in England was giving sanitary reform
fresh urgency, all the ancient district commissions
of sewers throughout London (except that
of the City) were superseded by a single new
authority, the Metropolitan Commission of
Sewers, upon which extensive new powers were
conferred in the autumn of 1848. During the
three years 1846–8 living conditions at the
Potteries had become so appalling that the average
age at the time of death among the 1,056 inhabitants
was only 11 years and 7 months, compared
with an average age at death throughout the
whole of London of 37 years. (ref. 7) Under Edwin
Chadwick's aegis the new Metropolitan Commissioners
immediately ordered their surveyors to
investigate the drainage of the locality, and in
March 1849 a preliminary report was presented,
which was followed in September by an engineering
survey.
The inhabitants of the Potteries were found
to be living at a density of about 130 to the acre,
and the number of pigs was 'upwards of 3000'.
The whole district was skirted by open ditches,
'some of them of the most foul and pestilential
character, filled with the accumulations from the
extensive piggeries attached to most of the houses.
Intersecting in various parts, and discharging into
the ditches on the north and west, are many smaller
but still more offensive ditches, some skirting
houses, the bedroom windows of which open over
them; some running in the rear and fronts of
houses, others at the sides and through the middle
of the streets and alleys, loading the atmosphere
throughout their course with their pestilential
exhalations.' The streets themselves were unpaved
and full of ruts, their surface was strewn with
refuse and often they were wholly impassable.
Most of the houses were 'of a most wretched class,
many being mere hovels in a ruinous condition',
filthy in the extreme, and containing vast accumulations
of garbage and offal. The water provided
by the wells in many yards was 'so contaminated
by the percolation of the foul drainage as to
be wholly unfit for domestic use, the inhabitants
being compelled to fetch water from a pump at
some distance, belonging to Mr. Bird, paying a
yearly rent for the privilege'. Much of the surrounding
locality was pockmarked by the excavations
made for brick-earth, which were now filled
with stinking stagnant water. The largest of
these pools, an acre in extent, occupied part of the
present Avondale Park, and was known as 'the
Ocean'. Several adjacent houses discharged their
drainage direct into this slimy sea, upon whose
western shore stood the National Schools of St.
James, Norland, attended by some 150 pupils. (ref. 8)
The only covered sewer in the area extended
along the modern Kenley Street and Walmer
Road, but at too high a level to provide drainage
for the houses there. The only possible outfall was
to the main Counter's Creek sewer, some 1,300
feet to the westward, and by September 1849 the
building of this line was in progress. (ref. 9) In the
winter of 1850–1, when this work had evidently
been completed, the Metropolitan Commissioners
began to build over 3,000 feet of sewers in the
streets of the locality. (ref. 10)
By this time cholera had broken out in the Potteries,
and in the first ten monthsof 1849 there were
21 deaths there from either cholera or diarrhoea.
With 29 other deaths from typhus and other causes
during the same period the mortality rate reached
the enormous figure of 60 per 1,000 living, compared
with the average for all London of 25–4 per
1,000 in the years 1846–50. (ref. 11) Goaded by their
medical officers, and by those of the General
Board of Health, who insisted that efficient
drainage alone would never remove the evils
connected with the piggeries, the Kensington
Board of Guardians of the Poor at last agreed to
prosecute a number of the pig-keepers. At a case
brought before the magistrates at Hammersmith
Police Court in September 1849, the court ordered
the immediate removal of the pigs from one
particularly offensive spot, and it was also announced
that orders would be issued for the gradual
removal of all the pigs in the locality. But the
presiding magistrate stated that 'he wished the
Orders to be executed in such a way as would be
attended with the least injury to the Poor People
to whom the Pigs belonged'. With this encouragement
the inhabitants of the Potteries promptly
presented a petition to the Guardians protesting
against the intended removal of the pigs, and in
October the Guardians (one of whom owned
property in the Potteries) decided that no further
penalties would be enforced, provided that the
premises in question were kept clean. (ref. 12)
When another case was brought in 1853 the
'Islanders', as the pig-keepers now regarded themselves,
were defended by their own lawyer, who
(according to an account published in The Builder)
asserted that his clients had a prescriptive right to
their piggeries, and that they had settled in the
district before the surrounding streets had been
built. 'If a pig was a nuisance, why we should
have no more pork. It was a nuisance to the pigdealer
to have a respectable neighbourhood, and
the best thing the complainants could do would
be to remove.' (ref. 13) The magistrates' order was evidently
not rigorously enforced, and although the
total number of pigs declined by about half
between 1849 and 1856, the mortality rate of
the Potteries showed no corresponding fall.
Deaths from cholera during the outbreak of 1854
totalled 25 (compared with 21 in 1849), and in
1856 the general death rate there was said to
fluctuate between 40 and 60 per 1,000 living, 87
per cent of deaths being among children under
five years of age. (ref. 14) The statement made in 1850
by one of the medical officers of the General
Board of Health, that the 'amount of sickness and
death' in the Potteries 'may be equalled, but can
scarcely be exceeded by any part of England' was
probably still true six years later. (ref. 11)
In 1855 the administration of London was reorganized
by the Metropolis Management Act (ref. 15)
and the reconstituted vestries and new district
boards became responsible, under the overall
supervision of the Metropolitan Board of Works,
for local sewers. They could compel owners of
existing houses to construct drains into the common
sewer, and no new houses were to be built
without proper drains. They were to be responsible
for street paving, lighting and cleansing, for the
regulation of underground vaults and cellars and
for the enforcement of the cleansing of houses.
It was also their duty to enforce an important new
Nuisances Removal Act, (ref. 16) and they were to
appoint their own medical officer of health and
inspectors of nuisances.
The Potteries at once became the principal
target of the Kensington Vestry's first medical
officer, Dr. Francis Godrich. In his first reports
to the Vestry and its Sewers Committee he
stated that the inhabitants in general looked 'sallow
and aged, the children pale and flabby, their
eyes glistening as if stimulated by ammonia'.
Many of them lived in converted railway carriages
and vans, the water supply was exiguous, and smallpox
was ten times more fatal than in the surrounding
districts. The principal sources of
livelihood were the rearing and fattening of pigs,
which in April 1856 numbered 1,041 beasts, and
the preparation of pig wash. This consisted of
refuse and offal ('blood, sheeps' entrails, liver and
vegetable matter, all undergoing decomposition
and often in a state of putrefaction'), which was
collected from the hotels and club-houses of the
West End as well as from local slaughter houses,
and boiled down in huge coppers which emitted the
'most sickening' odours over the adjacent locality. (ref. 17)
Dr. Godrich recommended to the Vestry that
the pigs should gradually be removed, that a water
supply should be laid to each house and the open
privies converted into closets properly drained,
and that 'the Ocean' should be filled in. These
policies were accepted, but the Vestry was impressed
by the dependence of the inhabitants upon
the pig industry, and therefore decided that the
removal of the beasts 'should be dealt with cautiously
under the circumstances'. Proceedings
were, however, at once taken against four pig
owners, (ref. 18) and during the four years 1856–9 a
series of legal contests ensued. The result appears
to have been inconclusive, (ref. 19) for although large
numbers of animals were annually removed at the
behest of the Vestry, pigs breed fast, and by 1869
the total number of beasts (which was no doubt
constantly fluctuating) had actually increased to
1,190. (ref. 20)
There was, however, some improvement in
other directions. As early as 1853 Mary Bayly,
who lived in Lansdowne Crescent, had formed a
Mothers' Society in the Potteries, inter alia for the
education of its members in the elements of
hygiene, and between 1858 and 1863 the first
makeshift schools in the area were replaced by
permanent buildings—a ragged school, built under
Lord Shaftesbury's auspices, in Penzance Street
in 1858, and St. James's National Schools in
Penzance Place in 1863. (ref. 21) St. John's Church was
building a school on the west side of Walmer
Road in 1861, (ref. 22) while the Roman Catholics
catered for the Irish element of the population
with the Church of St. Francis (1859–60), followed
by a school (1862–3), both in Pottery
Lane. (ref. 23) In 1865 a school was built beside the
intended new church of St. Clement's, Treadgold
Street (consecrated in 1867), and several nonconformist
congregations were also active in the
area. These civilizing influences were accompanied
by improvements in the drainage of the locality,
which were effected during the 1860's by the
Vestry and, indirectly, by the completion of the
system of main sewers by the Metropolitan Board
of Works. The streets, too, were paved and taken
over by the Vestry, and by 1863 even 'the Ocean'
had at last been filled in. Despite the continued
presence of the pigs Dr. Godrich felt able in 1869
to report that 'the Potteries are in a more cleanly
and healthy condition, principally owing to the
improved drainage afforded by the Metropolitan
Board of Works'. (ref. 24)
In 1871 Godrich was succeeded as medical
officer by Dr. Thomas Orme Dudfield, who held
the post until his death in 1908. Despite the
improvements made in the 1860's, Dudfield was
clearly aghast at the state of the Potteries. He
found that the population was rising, probably due
to an influx of people displaced from more central
parts of London by the extensive railway demolitions
of the 1860's, and that 'there were probably
as many pigs as human beings in the place'. The
density of population had risen to 180 per acre,
compared with an average of 71 for the whole
parish, and the death rate in 1870 was 31 per
1,000 living (21 for the parish), 63 per cent of
these deaths being among children under five
years of age.
Dudfield brought a new energy to the redress of
the conditions which these figures represented.
He at once persuaded the Vestry to appoint a
third sanitary inspector to his staff, and in 1873 he
touched on the heart of the problem when he
used the Artisans' and Labourers' Dwellings Act
of 1868 to certify a number of houses in the
Potteries as unfit for human habitation. Some of
these houses were repaired, and some were
demolished, but others remained in the same condition,
and little improvement in housing took
place for many years. But with the pigs he was
more successful. Seven hundred animals were
removed during his first year in office, despite
the insults and even violence to which the local
sanitary inspector was subjected. Three years later
'nearly all' the pigs had been removed, though
many of them had merely been taken a few
hundred yards westward into the parish of
Hammersmith, and prosecutions were being
brought against the dealers in 'wash', the noxious
effluvia of which now constituted the principal
nuisance. (ref. 25) The keeping of pigs in the Potteries
as a regular business finally ceased in 1878, although
short-lived attempts to revive it were made
in later years, the last being in 1894. (ref. 26)
By this time extensive new building was taking
place on the ground to the west and north-west of
the Potteries. Shortly before his death in 1865 (ref. 27)
Stephen Bird had started to build on the sixteen
acres of his brick-field, and new houses were also
springing up in great numbers on the land further
north. (ref. 28) Here the principal developer was James
Whitchurch, an attorney from Southampton, (ref. 29)
whose Hampshire origins are still commemorated
by Silchester and Bramley Roads (fig. 90). Under
its Act of 1836 the Birmingham, Bristol and
Thames Junction Railway Company had been
required to buy intact some 130 acres of land
belonging to the Bishop of London, and to sell
those parts not required for the line. (ref. 30) In 1841
Whitchurch, in association with two other gentlemen,
one from Southampton and one from Banbury,
had bought some forty-seven acres of this
land in Hammersmith from the company, of which
he had been appointed a director in the previous
year, for c. £138 per acre. (ref. 31) Four years later he
bought forty-nine acres in Kensington, to the
north of Bird's brick-field, from G. Archer Shee
of Manchester, esquire, for approximately £240
per acre. (ref. 32) During the building boom of the
mid 1840's Whitchurch was making arrangements,
on behalf of his associates as well as of
himself, with the Westminster Commissioners
of Sewers for the drainage of the whole of these
lands. By the end of 1847 he had built over a mile
of sewers in and around Latimer, Bramley, Silchester
and Walmer Roads, (ref. 33) the bow-shaped
course of the latter extending along the northern
extremity of his land, parallel with the adjacent
boundary of the St. Quintin estate. A few of the
small detached or paired houses built at this time
still survive, in sadly dilapidated condition, but
this first phase in the development of the area was
halted by the financial crisis of 1847, and when
building began to revive a year or two later it
appears to have been under the auspices of the
Frugality Building and Investment Society, with
offices in the City. (ref. 34)
Whitchurch was, however, still concerned in
the development of the area, and the impetus of the
building boom of the early 1860's was no doubt
greatly strengthened by the construction of the
Hammersmith and City Railway line, of which he
was a director. This railway, opened in 1864, was
the first of the feeder lines to be connected to the
Metropolitan Railway, which had been opened
between Paddington and Farringdon Street in
January 1863. It extended from its western
terminus at Hammersmith through Shepherd's
Bush and Notting Dale (where there was a station
at Ladbroke Grove) to its junction with the Great
Western Railway at Westbourne Park, and there
was also a connexion with the Birmingham,
Bristol and Thames Junction (now renamed the
West London Railway). With a half-hourly service
it was now possible for residents in even such
hitherto inaccessible parts of North Kensington
as Whitchurch's estate to reach the City in a
matter of minutes. (ref. 35)
But the construction of the great high arches
upon which the railway strode across the halfcompleted
streets of Whitchurch's carefully contrived
layout had an impact upon the existing social
fabric of the locality exceeded only by that of the
elevated motorway which was opened along much
the same course in 1970. With Bird's worked-out
brick-field and the Potteries to the south, and the
noise and dirt of frequent steam trains traversing
the estate, the area had no attraction for middleclass
residents. After the introduction of cheap
workmen's fares in the early 1860's workingclass
suburbs were beginning to be a practicable
proposition, and in the ensuing decades Bird's
and Whitchurch's remaining vacant lands were
covered with densely packed rows of three- or
four-storey houses and artisans' cottages. (fn. b)
The southern part of this area quickly became
an overspill for the Potteries, to which, it was
stated in 1865, many working men were being
driven 'from other parts of Kensington, Paddington,
etc., by the inroads of railways'. (ref. 30) Migrants
also came here after displacement by clearances
at St. Giles in the Fields, Campden Place at
Notting Hill (now Clanricarde Gardens) and
Jennings's Buildings in Kensington High Street. (ref. 37)
Hemmed in on the west by the West London
Railway, and cut off from the more well-to-do
parts of the Norland estate on the south by the
houses in Darnley Terrace and St. James's
Gardens, it became an isolated backwater whose
social problems could easily be forgotten at the
Vestry Hall in far-away Kensington High Street.
As early as 1872 Dr. Dudfield informed the
Vestry of the high rates of mortality prevalent in
the area now occupied by Henry Dickens Court,
and in 1878 he referred in general terms to the
existence of overcrowding. (ref. 38) But after the elimination
of the pigs from the Potteries in 1878, the
Vestry's concern seems to have declined. It had
not bothered to use its powers conferred by an
Act of 1846 for the provision of baths and washhouses
until 1878 (when the neighbouring parishes,
Paddington, Hammersmith and Chelsea, had all
built such establishments), and subsequent progress
was slow. The purchase of a suitable site
proved troublesome, a special Act had to be obtained,
and Kensington's baths and wash-houses,
built at the junction of Silchester and Lancaster
Roads to designs by Thomas Verity, were not
finally opened until 1888. (ref. 39)
(fn. c) Nor did the Vestry
trouble to exercise its powers under an Act of
1866 for the regulation of the number of persons
who might occupy a house let in lodgings, or
inhabited by members of more than one family.
When the Local Government Board at last compelled
the Vestry to act in 1883, the staff of the
sanitary inspectorate was not increased, and progress
was extremely slow. (ref. 41) Even in the one major
public improvement made in the locality during
these years—the purchase of four and a half acres
of derelict ground known as Adams' Brickfield,
for recreational purposes—the Vestry was prompted
by the vicar of St. Clement's Church (who by
means of a letter to The Times collected £637)
and assisted by substantial contributions from the
Metropolitan Board of Works and the Charity
Commissioners. The Vestry's original intention
to install a refuse destructor was abandoned, the
site was purchased from the Adams family in
1889, and after the excavations, seven feet in
depth, had been filled in, the park was formally
opened on 2 June 1892. It was called Avondale
Park in memory of the recently deceased Duke of
Clarence and Avondale. (ref. 42)
Private agencies and the churches were,
however, a good deal more active. The London
City Mission and a rescue society were both working
in the area, the latter being a temperance organization
with its own 'workmen's hall', opened
in 1861. The Latymer Road Mission opened a
ragged school two years later, (ref. 43) and the West
London Tabernacle in Penzance Place was built in
1864. At the corner of Queensdale and Norland
Roads there was a Baptist chapel, later taken over
by the Salvation Army, while at the diagonally
opposite extremity of the area, an 'iron' church,
St. Andrew's, was built at the corner of Walmer
and Lancaster Roads in 1862, (ref. 44) followed by
schools in 1865. (ref. 36) After the destruction of this
church by fire in 1867 (ref. 45) a Methodist chapel was
built on the site in 1878–9, (ref. 46) but another church,
St. Clement's, had in the meantime been built in
1867 in Treadgold Street, within the site of
Bird's former brick-field, (ref. 47) also two London
School Board schools (Latimer Road, 1879, and
St. Clement's Road, 1880), a district relieving
office and dispensary (later a workhouse) in Mary
Place, and a police station (1878). (ref. 48)
Yet despite all these efforts the social problems
of the area were soon to be publicly shown to be
far from resolved. By the early 1890's the principal
causes for the original establishment of a slum
here—grossly inadequate drainage, water supply
and control of building, plus the presence of the piggeries
and the brick-fields—had all been removed,
but new forces ensuring its continued existence
were already exerting their influence. We have
previously seen that in the 1860's and 1870's
migrants displaced from their dwellings elsewhere
by the building of railways and by clearances in
other parts of Kensington had found refuge here.
In the 1880's and 1890's this process was continued,
the fall in demand for casual unskilled
labour in the central areas of London (caused by
the decline of some industries there and the
removal of others to the outskirts), and the demolition
of more of the remaining slums there,
being probably the principal reasons for more
migrations into the Potteries. (ref. 49)
The social situation thus created was first
brought to the public notice in January 1893
through the publication in the Daily News of an
article entitled 'A West-End Avernus'. In this
article the author denounced in the lurid language
appropriate to the popular press the social conditions
in St. Katherine's Road (now Wilsham
Street), William (now Kenley) Street, Bangor
and Crescent Streets (sites now occupied by Henry
Dickens Court) and part of St. Clement's (now
Sirdar) Road, and concluded that he had never
seen 'anything in London more hopelessly degraded
and abandoned than life in these wretched
places'. The incumbents of St. James and St.
Clement and the chairman of the Kensington
Vestry's Works and Sanitary Committee all wrote
letters to the editor, the clergy in support of the
article and the chairman in bitter resentment at the
'assumption that the Vestry of Kensington are
indifferent to the state of the poor people inhabiting
what is known as the "Potteries" district,
Notting Dale'. In face of continued public interest
the Works Committee held a special meeting
on 2 March, to which a number of local
inhabitants were invited, and the whole party
subsequently made an inspection of the area. (ref. 37)
Almost all the houses within the five streets in
question (fig. 90) had already been registered by
the Vestry as let in lodgings or occupied by more
than one family, and were therefore liable to
periodic inspection. There were also eleven common
lodging-houses, providing accommodation
for 723 persons, which were regularly inspected
twice a week by the police. The population was in
fact extremely migratory in character, and the
Vestry felt able to claim that most of the houses
were in fair structural and sanitary condition,
the streets clean and the sewerage satisfactory;
but that such defects as did exist were 'of constant
recurrence in houses occupied by the lowest
classes, and are largely brought about by the
dirty and careless or mischievous habits of the
people themselves'. The remedy must therefore
be increased house-to-house inspection, and a
temporary extra sanitary inspector was accordingly
appointed. (ref. 37)
It is clear, however, that Dr. Dudfield, the
medical officer, was taken aback by the extent of
the problems which had been revealed. He admitted
cautiously that there was 'possibly a good
deal of overcrowding', (ref. 37) and by the summer of
1893 he was making extensive use of his powers
(which he had apparently only used once before,
in 1873) to certify a number of houses as unfit for
human habitation. (Most of these houses were
subsequently repaired by the landlords under the
Vestry's superintendence.) (ref. 50) He seems to have
been unaware of the incidence of mortality within
the 'Avernus' area, and in 1893 he could only
report that the death rate in Notting Dale was
probably 'considerably in excess of the average for
the whole Parish'. (ref. 37) But he now began to make
new calculations, and in 1895 it was found that in
the whole of the sanitary district in which the
'Avernus' was situated, the death rate (33.3 per
1,000 living) was more than double that for the
whole of the parish (16.4), while in the 'Avernus'
itself the number was no less than 42.6 per
1,000. (ref. 51) This last figure showed that the incidence
of death in the 'Avernus' in the 1890's was comparable
with the rates which had prevailed in the
pig- and disease-ridden Potteries in the 1850's.
Nor was this all, for in 1896 Dr. Dudfield published
the first figures for infantile mortality
within the 'Avernus', which showed that no less
than 432 out of every 1,000 children born there
died before reaching the age of one year, compared
with only 176 per 1,000 births in the whole parish
and 161 in all London. (ref. 52) These figures must
have come as a terrible shock to Dudfield, for as
recently as 1888 he had been congratulating
himself on the steady fall in the death rate of the
parish taken as a whole. In his annual report for
that year he had pointed out that whereas the
death rate for all Kensington in the years 1866–1870 had been 20.2 per 1,000 living, 'In 1871,
upon my appointment, a more vigorous sanitary
administration' had been organized, 'which soon
began to produce good results', culminating in the
years 1881–7 in a fall to 16.1 per 1,000. (ref. 53) He, at
all events, was now determined to do everything
possible to eradicate the shame of the 'Avernus'.
But the sanitary record of the Kensington
Vestry was marred in its closing years by indifference
to the urgency of the problem. In
1896 a special committee of the Vestry was set
up to inquire into what steps might be taken to
remedy the deplorable mortal statistics revealed
by Dr. Dudfield. In its report the committee,
like its predecessor in 1893, 'attributed the bad
condition of the houses, and the evil state in which
the inhabitants were found, or represented, to be,
to the vicious proclivities and evil habits of the
people themselves', who were 'largely made up of
loafers, cab-runners, beggars, tramps, thieves,
and prostitutes'. Again as in 1893, the committee
'concluded that the necessity for frequent sanitary
inspection can hardly be over-stated'. In fact,
however, the Vestry reduced the sanitary staff from
seven inspectors to six, (ref. 52) thereby making each
inspector responsible for the sanitary welfare of
over 28,000 inhabitants—almost the highest ratio
24—S.L. XXXVII
in all London. The yards and streets were paved
with asphalt and minor improvements were made
to the drainage, (ref. 54) but all of Dr. Dudfield's pleas
for an increased inspectorate were resolutely
rejected. (ref. 55) His other remedy, that the Vestry
should buy houses in the area and let them in
lodgings itself, could not be achieved without a
change in the law, for which he vigorously campaigned. (ref. 54)
Meanwhile the population of the
Notting Dale Special Area, as Dudfield now
termed the 'Avernus' district, was increasing at
the rapid rate of 4 per cent per annum, many of
the new immigrants being employed in the building
of the Central Tube Railway, (ref. 56) and the death
rate was actually rising, to an average of 53.4 per
1,000 living for the years 1897–9. (ref. 57)
In May 1898 the Local Government Board
announced its intention to inquire into the
sanitary administration of the parish, but before the
inquiry could begin the London County Council
instructed one of its medical officers to investigate. (ref. 54)
In his report, which was published by the L.C.C.
in December 1899, he stated that 'whereas in
former years the Vestry of Kensington compared
favourably with other London sanitary authorities
in the exercise of the powers which they then
possessed, they have not at the present time the
staff necessary for the proper exercise of the
additional powers which Parliament has in recent
years conferred upon London sanitary authorities'.
In Notting Dale it was impossible even to make a
single thorough inspection in the course of a year
of the houses let in lodgings, whereas the common
lodging houses (now under the L.C.C.'s supervision)
were inspected weekly. He flatly contradicted
the Vestry's views when he stated that 'the
condition of rooms such as those found in large
numbers in Kensington can by no means be excused
on the ground of the uncleanly habits of
the occupants', and concluded unequivocally that
at least four additional sanitary inspectors were
required. (ref. 58)
Shortly afterwards the Vestry was superseded,
under the terms of the London Government Act
of 1899, by the Kensington Borough Council.
The new authority quickly called for an inquiry
into the nature and extent of overcrowding, (ref. 59) and
in 1901 four extra sanitary inspectors were
appointed. (ref. 60) Later in the same year the Council
accepted Dudfield's recommendation that it
should adopt the powers conferred by Part III of
the Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890,
which the Vestry had been precluded from using.
These empowered the Council to buy and renovate
existing lodging-houses and also to build new ones
itself. The Council decided to do both, in Kenley
Street, within the Notting Dale Special Area,
where the houses on the north side abutting on
Avondale Park were deemed suitable for renovation,
while those on the south side, on shallow
sites with basements and inadequate ventilation,
were to be totally rebuilt. The difficulties encountered
in buying all the interests in a large
number of properties were overcome by Sir
Henry Seymour King, the first Mayor of Kensington,
who made a large interest-free loan to the
Council and accepted personal liability for all the
purchases. On the north side of Kenley Street
26 houses were remodelled as 52 dwellings, with
new sculleries, lavatories, stoves, dressers and
larders, while on the south side 17 houses were
demolished and replaced by six blocks arranged
in 36 self-contained two-room flats. Nearby
in Hesketh Place and Thomas (now Runcorn)
Place 26 one-room tenements were also built,
and by the end of 1906 120 tenements containing
245 rooms had been provided in the area, at
weekly rents ranging from 3s. 6d. up to 8s. At a
density of two per room there was accommodation
for some 490 people, (ref. 59) and the total charge
to the rates was £1,231 per annum until 1929,
decreasing annually by £28. (ref. 61) The general level
of the rents seems, however, to have been too
high for the casually-employed, unskilled poor,
for only one fifth of the families housed in Kenley
Street after the Council's building works had
lived in the street before, (ref. 59) and in 1912 it was
generally acknowledged that the Kenley Street
scheme had led to an extension of the furnished
room trade to other parts of the Borough. (ref. 62)
The Kenley Street scheme and the greatly
improved system of house-to-house inspection
which he was able to provide under the Borough
Council's aegis marked the culmination of Dr.
Dudfield's long career, and by 1907 (the year
before his death) the number of deaths per 1,000
living had fallen in the Notting Dale Special Area
from an average of 50.4 in 1896–8 to 30.2. The
labours of the clergy, of the district nurses and
district visitors and a number of other philanthropic
agencies, coupled with those of the Board
of Guardians and the sanitary department, had all
contributed to produce what was in 1907 considered
to be a 'very marked improvement in the
moral aspect of the place' (ref. 63) —a verdict endorsed
by Octavia Hill, who since 1899 had been responsible
for the management of a number of
houses in the locality. (ref. 64)
After the completion of the Kenley Street
scheme in 1906, no more rehousing was undertaken
by the Borough Council until after the war
of 1914–18, but during these intervening years
the problems of North Kensington were becoming
increasingly complex. In 1901 the population of
Golborne Ward (fig. 91), in the north-eastern
extremity of the Borough, (fn. d) reached its virtual
peak figure of 26,307, equivalent to a density of
233 persons per acre, or nearly double that of
Norland Ward (120 per acre), in which the Notting
Dale Special Area was situated. (ref. 62) At that
time the Registrar General regarded two as the
standard number of persons who might occupy a
single room without overcrowding it, and, despite
the very high density, there was, by this standard,
relatively little overcrowding in Golborne Ward—only 84 cases in single rooms compared with
343 in the Norland Ward. According to the
Borough Council's by-laws, which required 400
cubic feet of space for each adult, there were few
cases of overcrowding anywhere, for many of the
three- or four-storey terrace houses common in
North Kensington contained rooms adequate by
this standard for six persons. (ref. 65) The population of
Golborne Ward was evidently at this time more
evenly distributed than that of Norland Ward, and
the death rate there was still substantially lower
(in the years 1905–7 17.5 per 1,000 living compared
with 19.3). In his survey of social conditions
published in 1902 Charles Booth only referred
to one small part of Golborne Ward, Kensal New
Town, and even here he found that there were
only comparatively few 'very poor' inhabitants;
whereas in Sirdar Road in Notting Dale he found
extensive poverty 'of as deep and dark a type as
anywhere in London'. (ref. 66)
Figure 91:
Ward areas in Kensington
Fresh pockets of poverty and overcrowding
were nevertheless forming in areas away from
Notting Dale during the first decade of the
twentieth century—in Barlby Road and Treverton
Street, near the Great Western Railway, (ref. 67)
and in Bolton Road, off Westbourne Grove, for
instance—and this seems to have been directly
related to a fall in the overall population. In the
decade 1901–11 this fall amounted to 2.9 per cent
in Golborne Ward and to 10.7 per cent in Norland
Ward, many well-to-do people having evidently
emigrated to better accommodation in the new
houses being built on the St. Quintin estate and
further afield. (ref. 68)
The effect of this fall in population upon the
social character of Golborne Ward was clearly
stated by the medical officer in 1911. 'As the
difficulty of finding tenants for the lodgings in
such Wards as Golborne increases, the housing
problem becomes more and more perplexing.
Landlords find themselves in a dilemma where the
choice lies between receiving the lowest class of
tenant and leaving their houses unoccupied. If
they elect to take lodgers of doubtful character,
their property is knocked about and the rent is not
paid. On the other hand if no more than half the
tenements in a lodging-house are let to persons
who pay regularly, and the rest of the house stands
empty, legitimate returns on the capital outlay are
eaten up by the cost of necessary repairs. It will
accordingly be understood that the task which is
set the Council of securing satisfactory lodgings for
the less fortunate of the working population in
the Ward of Golborne and similar districts is one
of the utmost difficulty, and further that no small
part of the difficulty experienced has been directly
due to an exodus from Kensington to districts
where better accommodation can be obtained at
lower rents.' (ref. 69) By 1914 there were over one
thousand vacant rooms in North Kensington
available for the working classes. Areas of extreme
poverty prevailed in all four of the wards there,
and in Golborne, where the whole population
was now of the working classes, there were
'large numbers of semi-destitute persons who have
no regular employment'. (ref. 70)
During and immediately after the war of 1914–1918 the decline of population was reversed, and
the census of 1921 showed that the number of
inhabitants in each of the four wards of North
Kensington had risen since 1911—in Golborne
to its absolute peak of 26,329. By this time there
were over 5,000 houses in the Borough which
were let in lodgings and occupied by some
55,000 of the working classes without having
been adapted to this new use. Houses of this kind
had been built for occupation by a single family
but were now occupied by up to seven. Often they
had eight or nine large living-rooms spread over
three or more floors, but with only one watercloset
and one water tap, both in the basement.
There were no sinks upstairs, and clean water had
to be carried up and dirty water down. An important
part of the Borough Council's housing
effort was accordingly directed towards the unspectacular
work of remedying conditions of this
kind. This was done by continuing the registration
of all houses let in lodgings (after 1923 at the
rate of at least four hundred per annum), by the
improvement of all registered houses, if necessary
by compulsion, by closing underground rooms and
by closing houses deemed unfit for human habitation.
In 1923 the Council decided that landlords
should be required to provide one water-closet for
every twelve people, and a proper water supply. (ref. 71)
By 1926, when the Council promulgated new
by-laws for the control of houses let in lodgings,
over 3,600 such houses had been registered. (ref. 72)
In the provision of new housing the Council
decided in 1920 that 314 dwellings would be
required within the next three years to meet the
needs of the Borough, and by 1927 it had built
317 new flats or houses, most of them in the
Notting Dale area or on the St. Quintin estate.
As a matter of urgency it had also provided in 1919
another 102 flats or maisonettes by the conversion
of a number of large old houses, of which twelve
were in Powis Square. (ref. 73) But in general the
Council considered that 'there are many objections
to the local authority of any area becoming
property owners on a large scale, and they have not
felt disposed to acquire neglected and dilapidated
houses except in cases where the dwellings could
not be placed in good ownership by any other
plan'. (ref. 74)
Houses in bad repair were therefore often
brought to the attention of the housing associations
which became active in North Kensington
in the 1920's. The Improved Tenements Association
Limited (now the Rowe Housing Trust
Limited) had been founded in 1900 for the
acquisition and improvement of poor house
property, while the Wilsham Housing Trust had
been established in 1923 to continue the work
begun by Dr. Silvester in 1914 in both the
building of new houses and flats and the improvement
of existing tenements. (ref. 74) This dual
function was also performed by the Kensington
Housing Trust Limited, founded in 1926 under
the aegis of Lord Balfour of Burleigh, (ref. 75) and a
number of other similar bodies. Between 1914 and
1927 they provided a total of 422 new or renovated
dwellings in North Kensington, almost
exactly equalling the 419 provided in the same
period by the Council. (ref. 76) When the Sutton
Dwellings Trust (established in 1900 under the
will of W. R. Sutton, the carrier) bought some
eight and a half acres of land on the north side of
Dalgarno Gardens and built 540 flats there in
1929–30, the total stock of housing provided by
these private agencies (1,054) amounted to almost
double the number (558) provided by the Council,
even including the pre-war Kenley Street
dwellings. (ref. 77)
In 1932 the Council acquired the last remaining
building site of any size in the Borough, some
nine and a half acres on the north side of Dalgarno
Gardens to the east of the Sutton Trust's flats.
One acre of this land was sold to the Sutton
Trustees, another acre was leased at a nominal
rent to the Kensington Housing Trust, and the
Peabody Donation Fund took some five acres of
the remainder on similar terms. (ref. 78) By 1938 some
545 flats had been built here by these three
bodies. (ref. 79)
(fn. e) By the same year the total number of
houses or flats provided by all housing associations
amounted to 1,989, while that provided by the
Council amounted to 708 (plus 16 houses
acquired in 1938 in connexion with the redevelopment
of the Becher Street area). (ref. 81)
The close co-operation which existed between
the Borough Council and the housing associations
also extended to the complex rehousing
processes involved in the Council's slum-clearance
and improvement schemes. In the eight years
following the Housing Act of 1930 the Council
dealt with thirteen clearance areas (mostly in
Notting Dale and Kensal Green) in which 219
premises occupied by 1,117 people were demolished.
In the three improvement areas, at
Southam Street (Kensal Green), Treverton
Street (on the west side of the north end of
Ladbroke Grove) and Crescent Street (Notting
Dale), unsatisfactory basements were closed,
overcrowding abated and the houses thoroughly
reconditioned. In the fifteen-acre Southam Street
area, for instance, where there were no less than
390 persons to the acre, 778 basement rooms were
closed, sinks, drains and water-closets etc. renewed,
and the total population reduced by 29
per cent by the rehousing of overcrowded families,
many of them in accommodation provided by the
housing associations. (fn. f) At Crescent Street the
Council decided in 1938 to redevelop the whole
area, and the blocks of flats now known as Henry
Dickens Court were built here after the war of
1939–45. Between 1922 and 1938 some 1,790
individual houses deemed to be unfit but capable
of repair were also renovated at the Council's
instigation. (ref. 82)
More stringent overcrowding standards were
introduced by an Act of 1936, when a survey
showed that in the whole of Kensington there
were 2,529 families living in overcrowded conditions,
of which 2,342 were in North Kensington.
By the end of 1938, 740 overcrowded
families had been rehoused, but meanwhile 138
new cases had been discovered. (ref. 82) The census
of 1931 had shown that Kensington was one of
only four among the twenty-eight metropolitan
boroughs where an overall increase in population
had taken place during the previous decade. But
whereas the other three boroughs were all on the
peripheries of London and still possessed room for
new migrants, in Kensington there was hardly any
open space left. The principal cause of this inward
migration was thought to be the relatively central
situation of the Borough, attractive for different
reasons for both rich and poor, and a factor likely
always to aggravate the problem of overcrowding
there. (ref. 83)
This was to be particularly the case in the
north-eastern part of the Borough, in Golborne
Ward. Between the war of 1914–18 and that of
1939–45 a large proportion of the joint housing
efforts of the Council and the housing associations
had been concentrated upon Notting Dale, which
with the Potteries had been the original centre
of Kensington's social problems, while many of
the new dwellings built in this period had of
necessity been erected in St. Charles Ward, on the
St. Quintin estate and around Dalgarno Gardens,
where the only remaining vacant land was situated.
Except at Kensal Green, and in Wornington
Road on the south side of the Great Western
Railway, where the Kensington Housing Trust
had soon after its foundation in 1926 bought and
renovated forty-eight dilapidated houses, (ref. 84) relatively
little building or general improvement had
yet been carried out in Golborne Ward. The
censuses of both 1921 and 1931 had shown that
both the density of population per acre and the
average number of persons per room were far
higher in Golborne than in Norland Ward. At
the census of 1931, indeed, the density of population
in Golborne (209.6 per acre) was the third
highest of all the wards throughout London, and
the Borough Council's survey of overcrowding,
made in 1935, had shown that one in every thirtyone
families were overcrowded in Golborne,
compared with one in every thirty-eight in
Norland. (ref. 85) From about 1934 onwards the
average death rate in Golborne began to exceed
that of Norland for the first time (in 1934–8,
14.8 per 1,000 living compared with 13.2).
After the war of 1939–45 the erection of the
Henry Dickens Court cluster of blocks of flats
in Notting Dale completed the almost total rebuilding
of the streets first exposed to the public
gaze by the 'Avernus' disclosures of 1893, and
the centre of gravity of the Borough's social
problems shifted north-eastward to Golborne
Ward, which has become the principal field of
more recent effort.
St. Clement's Church, Treadgold Street
Plate 18c
This church is the principal surviving memorial
to the formidable energy of its first incumbent,
the Reverend Arthur Dalgarno Robinson, who
laboured in North Kensington for some forty
years. After serving as curate of St. Stephen's,
Shepherd's Bush, he came to Notting Dale in
1860, where he found large numbers of artisans'
dwellings already in course of erection, and many
more in prospect after the building of the Hammersmith
and City Railway. He quickly persuaded
James Whitchurch, the principal landowner in the
district, to promise to give a site for a church, but
this was lost (according to Robinson by 'delay')
and in 1862 he erected a temporary iron church
at the junction of Lancaster and Walmer Roads,
to which a short-lived 'conventional district'
known as St. Andrew's was assigned. (ref. 86) Three
years later he was building a school for the children
of the Potteries, (ref. 36) and shortly afterwards he
purchased a site for a permanent church out of his
own personal resources. Here the present Church
of St. Clement was built and consecrated by
the Archbishop of Armagh on 7 May 1867. (ref. 87)
Throughout the whole of the previous seven
years he had worked without any personal
remuneration whatever. (ref. 88)
The architect of St. Clement's was J. P. St.
Aubyn. It was an inexpensive building costing
only about £4,000 and although there were no
galleries it provided some 900 sittings, all free. (ref. 89)
It is a wide, low church, built of yellow brick
with red bands and stone dressings, and has a large
expanse of slated roof, from which rises a slatehung
belfry turret containing a clock, and crowned
by a steep pyramidal spire. As with many village
churches, St. Clement's is small in scale and very
much part of its surroundings. It consists of a
broad nave flanked by three-bay, cross-gabled
aisles, and by projecting transepts of two bays
each. The chancel is narrow and low, with lean-to
aisles on either side, the southern of which contains
the Lady Chapel. There is a small porch at
the north-west corner, and an eastern range of
vestries extends across the full width of the chancel
and its aisles.
The most striking feature of St. Clement's is
its roof, supported by cast-iron columns which
are so light and elegant as to suggest the subdivision
of nave and aisles with practically no
physical interruption of the unity of the interior.
Throughout, the corbels which support the roof
are carved, but they lost much of their distinctiveness
when the strongly coloured brick interior
was painted white. The columns are now painted
a pale powder blue, and little of the former
warmth and richness remains. The chancel arch
and the lateral arches of the chancel arcade have
notched edges and hood mouldings of splayed
brickwork. There are carved naturalistic capitals
on the columns in the chancel.
The windows are generally lancets with sexfoil
roundels contained within the gables. The threebay
chancel has stepped triple lancets at the east
end. There are four lancets in the south aisle
with glass by Walter Tower of C. E. Kempe's
firm. Tower also designed the window in the
Lady Chapel. The west window of the north aisle
is by Martin Travers.
The principal treasure of the church is the
large cartoon of 'Jesus at the well of Samaria' by
Sir Edward Burne-Jones, which was presented
by Lord Leverhulme. It is drawn in pencil on
paper, and is a design for stained glass. In the north
transept is an oil painting of the Annunciation
by Alonzo Cano, which is said to have formed
part of an altarpiece formerly in Seville Cathedral.
The Crucifixus and richly ornamented candlesticks
on the high altar are by Omar Ramsden, the
cross being signed by him. The altar itself replaces
that destroyed by enemy action in 1944,
and is backed by a florid Renaissance-style
reredos. The gates of the finely-wrought iron
dwarf screen to the chancel have been removed, as
also has the iron enclosure around the font. The
open benches, by St. Aubyn, are simple designs in
wood, with the construction clearly expressed by
wedges and tenons.
Few structural alterations have been made to
the church, and later additions have not detracted
from its character. The removal of detail, however,
has contributed to the gradual erosion of St.
Aubyn's realized conception, and the painting of
the interior, a common fate of Victorian polychrome
brickwork, has greatly weakened the
original design.
Dalgarno Robinson's original iron church of
St. Andrew's had been destroyed by fire some six
weeks before the consecration of St. Clement's, (ref. 90)
and a Methodist chapel was built on its site in
1878–9. A consolidated chaperly was assigned to
St. Clement's in 1867, (ref. 87) and in 1875 Dalgarno
Robinson began the building of a second set of
schools. (ref. 91) By this time he was also concerning himself
with the northern part of his district, where
building development had been rapidly progressing
on the St. Quintin estate, and it was here, in
North Pole Road, that in 1874–6 he built himself
an enormous parsonage house, followed in 1882–1884 by another church, dedicated to St. Helen.
In the latter year this became the parish church
of the cure, and Dalgarno Robinson's headquarters
for the remaining fifteen years of his ministry (ref. 88)
(see page 322).
Roman Catholic Church and Schools of
St. Francis of Assisi, Pottery Lane
Plates 22, 23a, 23b, 33c; fig. 92
The main body of the Church of St. Francis of
Assisi, Pottery Lane, was built by Jackson and
Shaw in 1859–60 to the designs of Henry Clutton,
but the building work was supervised by John
Francis Bentley, then aged twenty, an assistant in
Clutton's office. In 1861 Bentley became sole
architect for the additions then in progress, and
he also designed many of the fittings still to be
seen in the church. (ref. 92)
The church, presbytery and school form a
close-knit irregular group on a tight wedgeshaped
site bounded on the east by the backs of
houses in Portland Road, on the west by Pottery
Lane, and on the north by Hippodrome Place.
The buildings stand in the Potteries, an area which
in the mid nineteenth century was notorious for
its insanitary conditions of living and for the
extreme poverty of its inhabitants, many of whom
were Irish immigrants or of Irish extraction. The
site for the new church was acquired by the English
branch of the Oblates of St. Charles Borromeo,
a small community of priests founded at Bayswater
in 1857 by Dr. Henry Manning (later
Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster) at the
behest of Cardinal Wiseman for the purpose of
missionary and educational work in north-west
London. One of the Oblates, the Reverend
Henry Augustus Rawes, was sent to the Potteries
very soon after the opening of the Oblates' Church
in Bayswater. The Church of St. Francis of Assisi
was built at Father Rawes' own personal expense,
and was opened on 2 February 1860. (ref. 93)
Figure 92:
Roman Catholic Church of St.
Francis of Assisi, Pottery Lane, plan
St. Francis's is built of stock brick relieved by
bands of black bricks, and is outwardly very simple
and austere. It is orientated north-south, and is
approached through a little courtyard (Plate
23a) bounded by the gabled wall of the church on
the south, by the presbytery on the east, by the
schools on the north, and by a pierced wall on the
west. It originally consisted of a three-bay nave,
divided from a liturgical north aisle by octagonal
piers carrying an arcade; a Lady Chapel; and a
chancel. The nave and aisle have a pitched timber
roof with exposed tie beams and braces resting
directly on the walls (Plate 22a). Light is admitted
by lancets in the nave, by cinquefoil lights
cut in plate tracery of stone, with pierced spandrels,
set in circular reveals in the chancel, and by lancets
and a rose window in the gable of the liturgical
west end. The style is a severely simple French
provincial Gothic based on thirteenth-century
examples. The church was subsequently enlarged
and enriched, but the original fabric remains
relatively untouched.
The Chapel of Our Lady of the Seven Dolours
extends 'eastwards' in a curve by cants nearly half
of the way round the apsidal chancel. It consists of
two bays and a three-sided apse, with groined
vaulting that springs from marble colonnettes
and from a pair of corbels. The liturgical north
side is pierced by two pairs of coupled lancet
windows, and on the 'south' side, an archway opens
into the chancel. The walls of the chapel are
lined with tiles above which are paintings, those
of the reredos being framed by carved alabaster. (ref. 94) <The Chapel has since been attributed to Bentley as part of his additions of 1861-3 (see Buildings of England, London 3: North West, 1991, p.464).>>
Very soon after its opening, it became apparent
that the church was too small, and Bentley was
asked to design additions. Some adjoining land
was acquired in 1861, and a start was made with
the addition of a baptistry at the 'west' end of
the existing aisle. By 1863 the structural enlargements
had been completed, the porch at the
north-west (or ritual west) end, and the presbytery
and school having also been built. <The school has since been rebuilt.>
The baptistry (Plate 22c), at the 'west' end of
the aisle, was enthusiastically described in The
Building News in 1863 as promising to be one of
the 'most complete little chapels in England'. The
materials with which it is constructed are of
excellent quality, and the design was declared to be
'very effective'. (ref. 95) It is a rectangular room the
width of the aisle, the stone vault, two bays wide,
being carried on marble columns with richly
carved capitals. Certain details of the masonry
were finished by Hardman in 1907 under the
direction of Bentley's son, Osmond, who also
designed the iron gates and screens dividing the
baptistry from the rest of the church. (ref. 96) The granite
font is an integral part of the design, and is set on a
pedestal of marble and alabaster. Its canopy of oak
was given by Bentley in 1865 as a thank-offering
for his conversion to Roman Catholicism in
1862, his being one of the first baptisms to take
place in the church from whose patron saint he
took his middle name of Francis.
While still Clutton's assistant, Bentley had also
designed a number of small accessories for the
church, including an alabaster offertory box, an
oak chancel seat, and a bracket for a statue of the
patron saint by the 'west' door. The altar of St.
John, however, on the 'north' wall of the Lady
Chapel, was designed by Bentley in March 1861
and marks an important development of his powers
(Plate 33c). It consists of an altar and reredos, the
latter with a moulded cusped frame of alabaster,
made by Earp of Lambeth, surrounding a painting
by N. H. J. Westlake. This was Westlake's
first work in collaboration with Bentley. The
frontal below has two paintings by Westlake
completed at the same time, one to each arch, representing
Daniel and St. John. (ref. 96) The architecture
of this altar embodies many of the elements of
Bentley's creative genius. The miniature columns,
huge capitals, and intricate inlays of marble are
indicative of what was to come later. The Building
News noted that Westlake's pictures were 'interesting
in a technical view, having been painted
in encaustic on slate, the effect being thoroughly
ecclesiastical'. (ref. 95)
Bentley also designed the altar and piscina of
the Lady Chapel. The former is of alabaster, its
frontal incorporating miniature paintings, and its
table carried on four marble columns, each surmounted
by capitals and elongated blocks that
contain panels in which an angel is depicted. The
central panel of the frontal consists of a quatrefoil
panel within which is a lozenge-shaped smaller
panel framing a painting of Our Lady of Dolours.
On either side are circular panels containing paintings
of female saints. The super-altar is decorated
with square foliate paterae and bosses of coloured
marble. (ref. 94)
Westlake executed the seven paintings on slate
representing the Seven Dolours of Our Lady,
three on the 'north' wall, three on the reredos,
and one on the 'south' side which forms the
'north-east' pier of the sanctuary. The designs
were exhibited at the Architectural Exhibition
in Conduit Street in 1861, Westlake's address
being given as 8 Gloucester Terrace, Clarendon
Road, Notting Hill.
The sumptuous high altar and reredos were
constructed in 1863 (Plate 22b). (ref. 96) They are of
alabaster, richly inlaid with marble and glass
mosaic. The brass door of the tabernacle is set
with enamels and precious stones, and is of exquisite
workmanship. The altar frontal consists
of four marble columns with ornate capitals and
richly carved cushions that support the table.
Recessed behind the columns is a painted panel
representing the dead Christ, while the lateral
panels, set back farther, are enriched with mosaics
in the early thirteenth-century style. The first
super-altar is inset with triangular patterns of dark
and light marbles, while the second is ornamented
by circular recessed panels, each with its inlay, and
divided vertically by inlays of black foliate patterns
remarkably Art Nouveau in appearance.
The reredos is of alabaster, and is set beneath a
strongly carved leaf cornice. It has four recessed
panels in the form of eight-pointed stars, containing
painted figures. A corbel is projected from
this cornice over the reredos, and carries a throne
on high with a vesica piscis panel in which mosaics
are set in an early thirteenth-century pattern. The
gilded canopy over the throne is surmounted by
the Pelican in Piety.
During 1863 Bentley designed reliquaries and
a confessional, and in the following year several
other items for Father Rawes, including metal
work, a monstrance, an iron offering-stand, a
processional cross, a music-stand, candlesticks,
vestments and frontals. (ref. 97) In 1864 the unfinished
stonework in the porch was carved, the chancel
was further enriched with marble, and the sanctuary
was completed with painted decoration.
Between 1865 and 1870 new Stations of the
Cross were painted by Westlake, in a style described
as 'a kind of modification of the German
School of the sixteenth century'. (ref. 98)
In 1870 Bentley designed a canopied niche for
the statue of Our Lady, obtaining, in the words
of his biographer, a 'very precious and refined
effect by the juxtaposition of various coloured
marbles and crystals'. (ref. 97) The elaborate bracketpedestal
is carried on a richly carved capital and
corbel bracket. The statue itself was carved by
Theodore Phyffers, who had been brought from
Antwerp by A. W. N. Pugin to work at the Palace
of Westminster. It is surmounted by a crown decorated
with fleur-de-lis motifs and carried by two
angels bearing palm fronds, a very similar design
to that of the exposition throne in the chapel of
the convent of the Poor Clares Colettines in
Ladbroke Grove. Phyffers also carved a crucifix,
which was 'executed in a bold and masterly
manner', to stand at the 'west' end of the church. (ref. 95)
<The stained glass of the east windows and the baptistery windows were designed by Bentley & Westlake, and made by Lavers & Barraud, 1872.>
In 1882 the church and presbytery were altered
when a tribune was constructed over the baptistry,
and a new room was added in the presbytery with
accommodation for three priests. The tribune is
reached from inside the presbytery, the door being
in the dining-room on the first floor.
The crucifix on the altar of St. John was given
to the church in 1909. Until 1871 it had stood
for many years on the high altar of the chapel of
the Tuileries Palace in Paris.
Osmond Bentley redecorated the Lady Chapel
in 1913, and Westlake's paintings were restored.
In 1917 a piscina designed by Walters was erected
in the Sancturary, and the statues of St. John and
St. Joseph, both the work of the Belgian sculptor
Blanchard, of the Guild of St. Luke, were presented
to the church.
The interior of St. Francis's was painted and
cleaned by G. N. Watts in 1926, and it was
restored and redecorated in 1960 under the
direction of A. J. Sparrow. (ref. 99)
The schools (of unknown date, in the school board manner) and the presbytery of 1861-3 are built of stock brick enlivened with
bands of black brick. They are grouped around the
small courtyard previously mentioned, a playground
for the children being provided on the
flat roof of the school-house. The silhouette of
the whole group of buildings, with gables, pinnacles,
metal finials and school bell-turret,
adds a welcome liveliness to this corner of Notting
Dale.
Notting Hill Methodist Church,
Lancaster Road
Plate 28e, f; fig. 93
This church, built of white Suffolk bricks with
yellow stock brick voussoirs and bands, stone
dressings, and a grey slate roof, is conspicuously
sited at the junction of Walmer and Lancaster
Roads. It was erected in 1878–9 by Jesse Chessum
of Shoreditch; (ref. 100) the architect is not known.
It is a two-storey building, the church halls being
situated in the semi-basement, while the church
proper and several small meeting-rooms are on the
first floor. The style is eclectic Gothic.
No. 235 Lancaster Road
This house was designed in 1863 by John Francis
Bentley, and was his 'first essay in purely domestic
architecture'. It was commissioned by the
artist N. H. J. Westlake. (ref. 101)
The house is situated at the corner of Lancaster
Road and Treadgold Street. It has three
storeys over a basement and is built of brick with
stone dressings. The main entrance, on the corner
of the house, is approached through an arched
opening and a flight of steps. The arched motif
appears again on the third storey, where a pair of
windows enlivens the façade to Lancaster Road.
Bentley intended a painted frieze to add further
interest to the exterior, but this was not carried
out. (ref. 101)
Figure 93:
Methodist Church, Lancaster Road,
plan
There is a niche at the corner of the house
which is filled by a cylindrical colonette, a curious
device, and quite unlike any recognizable model.
Indeed, the style of the house and its ancestry are
impossible to define, for there are elements from
Italian and Spanish medieval architecture applied
to an almost dourly plain exterior.
The house has been much alterted since Westlake's
day; modern windows have been inserted
and other changes have obscured the original design.
The single-storey Roman Catholic Primary
School of St. Francis, south of No. 235 Lancaster
Road, is entered from Treadgold Street. It has
similar fenestration to that of St. Francis's
School, Pottery Lane, and the detail evidently
derives from Bentley's work.