F. H. W. Sheppard (General Editor)
This, the third of the Survey’s four volumes devoted to Kensington, describes the southernmost part of the old parish, covering both sides of Brompton Road and then continuing westward between Old Brompton Road and Fulham Road as far as Brompton Cemetery. Renowned in the seventeenth century for the nurseries and market gardens of old Brompton, and the isolated genteel settlement of ‘Little Chelsea’ in Fulham Road, this area was by the time of the Survey’s study in 1983 a characteristic inner west London mix of well-to-do residences, exuberant shops, and streets of humbler but up-and-coming houses. The volume contains some notable set-pieces, such as Harrods, the Oratory, the Brompton Hospital and Brompton Cemetery (each of which is described in detail); but its main subject is the building-over of the various estates here from the early 1800s with streets, crescents and squares of houses, each demonstrative of their period — such as the urbane Regency-style stucco of Pelham and Egerton Crescents of the 1830s and ’40s, the rich classicism of The Boltons of the 1850s, and the High Victorian mix of styles in Redcliffe Square and surrounding streets of the 1860s and ’70s.