Evelyn Gardens
When Sir Charles James Freake died in October 1884 a
large parcel of ground in the south-western corner of the
estate, which he had taken under a building agreement
with the Smith's Charity trustees in February 1883, was
still largely undeveloped. The trustees appointed under his
will were his widow, Dame Eliza Freake, his long-time
assistant, James Waller, and Charles Townshend Murdoch,
a banker and later M.P. for Reading. (ref. 241) Waller
soon repudiated his trusteeship, (ref. 242) and Lady Freake and
Murdoch decided to find another builder to take on the
remainder of Freake's obligations under the agreement.
The ground was advertised and in October 1885 an
acceptable tender was received from the building firm of
C. A. Daw and Son. The approval of the Smith's Charity
trustees was obtained, and a building agreement between
Freake's trustees and Daws was signed on 24 April
1886. (ref. 243) Under this agreement Daws paid £4,000 for
Freake's plant and equipment, (ref. 244) and undertook to pay
an ultimate ground rent of £2,486 18s. (from 1890) to
Lady Freake and Murdoch. This represented an improved
ground rent of over £1,800 above the ground rent which
the executors had to pay to the Charity's trustees under
Freake's original building agreement, although his firm
had done some preliminary work on the site. Daws eventually
bought the improved ground rents at twenty-two-and-a-half years' purchase, a sum amounting to nearly
£50,000, or an average of about £700 per house.
Charles Adams Daw, the founder of the firm, was
Devonshire-born and had migrated in the early 1860's to
London, where he engaged in small-scale speculative
building in various parts of Kensington, Paddington and
St. Marylebone in partnership with two brothers. In the
early 1870's he had branched out on his own and was
shortly afterwards joined in business by his son, William
Adams Daw, who had been born in 1856. (ref. 245) From the
mid 1870's their firm had been building houses and flats in
De Vere Gardens and Palace Gate, and had encountered
some difficulties in disposing of the large houses in De
Vere Gardens. In Evelyn Gardens (which was named after
William John Evelyn, one of the Smith's Charity trustees),
therefore, they sought permission from the charity's trustees
to build smaller houses than had been stipulated in
Freake's building agreement. (ref. 246) After some negotiation
the trustees concurred, and, large as they may seem by
modem standards, the houses in Evelyn Gardens are
modest by comparison with those in De Vere Gardens or
with Freake's later Italianate houses in Onslow Gardens
and Cranley Gardens. One result was the provision of an
abundance of communal garden space, which was even
further increased when Daws decided to dispense with the
stabling Freake had proposed to build on the north and
west of the site, in continuation of Cranley Mews, and lay
out those sites as garden ground also. Otherwise the layout
which had been devised by Freake was basically adhered
to, apart from the extension of the north-south arm of
Evelyn Gardens northwards to communicate with Roland
Gardens.
The Chronology of Development
Daws began building in 1886 with Nos. 1–7 (odd) and
2–10 (even) Evelyn Gardens. (ref. 247) These are in fact larger
than subsequent houses in the development, the evennumbered
houses on the north side having four main
storeys, attics and basements, while those on the south
side, although having only three main storeys, have wider,
twenty-five-foot, frontages. The firm then concentrated in
1887 on building the northernmost terrace, consisting of
Nos. 31–44 (consec), originally called Evelyn Terrace,
where the houses are narrower, with twenty-one-foot
frontages for the most part, and have only three main
storeys. (ref. 248) The building of the two ranges which had
been begun in 1886 was resumed in 1888, but with
narrower, or lower, houses. (ref. 249) The long north-south
range, consisting of Nos. 45–70 (consec), was begun in
1890. Here the southernmost part of the long communal
garden at the back of the houses occupied the site of an
organ factory which had been made available to Daws by
the Smith's Charity trustees by a separate building agreement
of May 1892. (ref. 250) By 1895 only Nos. 59, 60 and 64
Evelyn Gardens remained untenanted, and these were all
occupied in the following year, (ref. 91) thus bringing the whole
development of seventy houses to a conclusion in ten
years.
Finance
The firm obtained the money to finance its building
operations from both institutional and private lenders.
Several mortgages were negotiated with the Union Assurance
Office, amounting by 1894 to £31,950 at four-and-a-half per cent interest on the security of eighteen
houses. (ref. 251) A further £24,516 was borrowed from the
County Fire Office, principally to buy up improved ground
rents from Freake's executors. (ref. 252) Individual mortgages
were usually arranged through solicitors, the lawyers and
their families sometimes supplying money themselves. For
instance, in 1887 several mortgages to members of the
Torr family were arranged through the solicitors, Torr,
Janeways, Gribble and Oddie. (ref. 253)
Sometimes the initiative seems to have come from
would-be mortgagees, especially in times of easy money
conditions. Thomas Peel of Bradford must have made the
first approaches, for in December 1887 he was informed
by Daws that, ‘Just at present we are not desirous of raising
any money having recently sold some property but we are
almost sure to be able to offer you some securities on our
Evelyn Estate within the next 3 or 4 months’, and in March
1888 they offered him No. 35 as security for £1,500 but
wanted a quick reply ‘as just now there is a good deal of
money to be had on good terms Mr. Goschen's conversion
having disturbed a lot of capital’. (ref. 254) Daws were often able
to pick and choose, negotiating more favourable interest
rates with one potential mortgagee than another. In 1895
they told one particularly irksome individual that he was
‘the most nervous and fidgetty mortgagee we have ever had
to deal with’. (ref. 255)
In the normal manner of Victorian building developments,
Daws let some houses in Evelyn Gardens at rack rents,
usually on twenty-one-year leases, and sold others
outright. No. 1, a spacious end house, was the first to be
taken, at a rent of £250 per annum, by John Henry
Clutton of the firm of surveyors who managed the Smith's
Charity estate. (ref. 256) No. 44, also an end house, was let at
£290 per annum, but generally rents ranged between
£170 and £210. (ref. 257) In the early stages of the development
rents were kept deliberately low, however, in order to
attract tenants. One house was both let and then sold for
low sums for exceptional reasons, as William Adams Daw
explained. ‘We have sold 2 Evelyn Terrace (No. 32
Evelyn Gardens] cheap’, he wrote, ‘because Sir F. Burrows
[Sir Frederic Abemethy Burrows, baronet and
solicitor] is our lawyer and as he acts for Freake's
trustees and wished to buy as an investment it suits us to be
on the best of terms with him. We pay some £2,000 a year
in ground rent to Freake's trustees and are constantly
wanting slight alterations in the building agreement and
variations of plan etc. which we could not ask for were we
on bad terms (or anything but the best of terms) with
everybody concerned. And secondly we sold this house for
£1,900 … because it is let for 21 years at £145 and if this
tenant were to leave she would certainly underlet with a
premium as similar houses are let for£l60 and we now ask
£170, so we would derive no further benefit from the
house for 21 years’ (ref. 258)
The highest price known to have been paid for a house
in Evelyn Gardens was £3,400, which Philip Norman, the
antiquary, scholar and artist, agreed to give for No. 45, a
larger house at the north end of the north-south range with
an extension at the rear for a studio. The house was fitted
out to Norman's specifications, five fireplaces being selected
from the Coalbrookdale Company, for instance. (ref. 259)
More usual prices ranged from £2,100 to £2,900. (ref. 260)
Daws were frequently informing investors or potential
purchasers that they had few houses left on their hands,
and in 1894 Henry Trollope of George Trollope and Son,
on being informed that the cheapest house left would cost
£2,600, or £190 per annum, remarked, ‘I liked the houses
very much and wish I could afford one, but am pleased to
see that they have gone off so well’. (ref. 261) The firm estimated
that it made a profit of about £250 on the sale of each
house, but as the estimate was for income tax purposes this
figure was probably on the low side. (ref. 262)
Architecture
All of the houses in Evelyn Gardens are in the red-brick,
Anglo-Dutch, Domestic Revival idiom, but there are
variations between groups of houses which generally correspond
to their different building dates (Plates 59a, 59c. fig.
32). There is no evidence, however, about the authorship
of the designs. One practice which the firm used elsewhere
was to approach an outside architect for either sketch or
detailed elevations, to which it would then fit plans. C. F.
A. Voysey, to whom Daws went for elevations for houses in
Chelsea, rather disparagingly called this a ‘shirt-front
arrangement’, (ref. 263) another example of the firm's use of this
system occurs in Hans Road (see page 15).
There is some reason to think, however, that in Evelyn
Gardens the firm may have dispensed altogether with the
services of an outside architect. When its initial plans were
submitted to an agent acting for Freake's trustees he commented about one set of designs that ‘The elevation … is
very ugly as to the upper part. It would be well for you to get
out an architect's plan for this … I think you may get over
the shops in front if you were to design a good elevation.’ (ref. 264)
(A proposal to build shops along part of the frontage to
Fulham Road was quickly dropped.) The absence of any
reference to an architect in the voluminous correspondence
about these houses which survives among the firm's records,
and the changes made as building progressed,
suggest that all the designs may have been prepared in the
firm's own drawing office. Purchasers who wanted alterations
made, like Philip Norman who had his own surveyor,
negotiated with the firm's foreman, a Mr. Kerswell. (ref. 265)
According to W. A. Daw, the houses ‘were all built together
under the same foreman and by the same gangs of workmen
who were shifted from one house to another as occasion
required’. (ref. 266)
Figure 32:
Evelyn Gardens, typical plans of Nos. 31–44 at top and
of Nos. 2–10 (even) at bottom. C.A. Daw and Son, builders.
1886–7
Of the first houses to be erected, Nos. 2–10 (even) have
‘back to front’ features of a kind sometimes found elsewhere
in conjunction with communal gardens (Plate 59c).
They are four-storey houses with basements and garrets
and have projections at the front rising through three main
storeys. These projections, which are more usually placed
at the rear of houses to accommodate the staircase or to
provide additional rooms off its half-landings, contain four
storeys at different levels from those of the main house and
arc capped with free-standing pediments. At their bases,
entrance porches project further forward (except at No. 2
where the entrance is at the side), and above the porches
are loggias set within arched recesses and entered from
half-landings. At three of the houses the pediments are
decorated with cut-brick ornament, and a bold modillion
cornice and frieze of terracotta (fn. a) (for the most part now
painted over) tie the houses together at both front and rear.
At roof level Nos. 2 and 4 have similar but not identical
gables while Nos. 6, 8 and 10 have dormer windows with
projecting semi-pyramidal hoods. (No. 4 has a twenty-one-foot frontage and No. 6 twenty-two-foot but Daws
thought them of equal value is No. 4 had the ‘better top
floor’. (ref. 268) ) The rear elecations to the communal garden
arc fully embellished and have bay windows on the lower
floors.
These arresting designs were not repeated, and the
differences even from house to house within this group are
characteristic of the variety introduced into the development
as a whole. Nos. 1–7 (odd) opposite, which were
erected at about the same time in 1886, arc three-storey
houses with wider frontages and dispense with projections
at front and back. All of the remaining houses have three
main storeys, basements and attics, and enclosed porches
with arched openings to the street, some with decorated
brick panels at the sides and others cement rendered. Nos.
V-29 (odd) also ha\e deep projections at the front containing
four storeys, with some inevitably clumsy joins
where they meet the main front wall, but in the other
houses such projections are more conventionally placed at
the back.
Symmetry is, in general, eschewed, although Nos.
31–44 (consec.) form a nearly symmetrical terrace with two
slightly projecting, gabled end houses framing three
groups of four houses. The outer groups have sash windows
with segmental heads dressed with red rubbed
bricks, but the middle group is in a ‘Jacobethan’ style with
stone mullioned-and-transomed windows and Dutch
gables. A similar style to the latter but with variations in
the gables was used on the middle group of houses in each
of the other east-west ranges, namely Nos. 12–22 (even)
and 9–19 (odd), and throughout the long north-south
range consisting of Nos. 45–70 (consec), although here
further variety was introduced by providing sash windows
set in stone or artificial stone surrounds for the upper
storeys (Plate 59a).
The houses have been little altered externally but have
inevitably undergone much internal change and modification.
One small job is perhaps worth mentioning; in 1930
Sir Edwin Lutyens designed a new bathroom for the top of
the rear extension of No. 50, probably for Sir Edward
James Reid, baronet, a director of Baring Brothers, who
was shortly to take up residence here. (ref. 269)
The layout of Evelyn Gardens pleased contemporaries
and near-contemporaries. Muthesius had this area specifically
in mind when he commented that ‘In this system of
unbuilt-up garden squares the layout of London's residential
quarter may almost be described as exemplary’, and in
1906 A. E. Street thought that both in its general disposition
and in its architectural features Evelyn Gardens was
commendably superior to earlier work in the same neighbourhood
(ref. 270) Most of the occupants of the houses were
evidently equally satisfied. Of the seventy families who first
moved into the new houses, thirty-eight lived there for ten
years or more and nineteen for at least twenty years. (ref. 91)
Occupants
The enumerators' books for the census of 1891 are not yet
open for public inspection and so less is known about the
first inhabitants of Evelyn Gardens than about those of
earlier developments; but some information can be derived
from directories. Several occupants can be identified as
merchants with firms in the City, and a number belonged
to the professions and the armed forces. The latter were
represented by two generals, three colonels, a major and
two captains. Those connected with the law included four
barristers and three solicitors. Among the other occupants
were a clergyman, an engineer and a surveyor (J. H.
Glutton at No. 1). Charles Digby Harrod, the proprietor of
Harrods, was the first occupant of No. 31 from 1888 to
1894, and Sir William Mackinnon, a surgeon-general to
the army and honorary surgeon to Queen Victoria, who
lived at No. 28, was pre-eminent in his profession. (ref. 271)
Philip Norman, the joint editor of the Survey of London
from 1909 to 1931, whose purchase of No. 45 has already
been noted, lived there from 1890 until his death in 1931.