Kensington Park Gardens is a street in Notting Hill.
Kensington Park Gardens is a broad, open street, connecting Ladbroke Grove to Kensington Park Road at the apex of Notting Hill, with a magnificent vista to St John’s church at the western end. Both sides of the street back onto communal gardens, and St John’s Church was built on its chosen site to close the vista at the west end of the street.
The housing was built in the 1850s during the second great wave of construction on the Ladbroke estate. In the filthy atmosphere of London in the 19th century, a considerable premium was put on being high up, and the land on which Kensington Park Gardens now stands was amongst the most valuable on the estate. The street contains some of the most important and grandest houses in the Ladbroke area.
The original layout plan for the area and designs for the houses in Kensington Park Gardens had been drawn up by the Ladbroke family’s architect and surveyor Thomas Allason in 1849, but he died before it could be fully executed. The earliest phase of development, Nos. 1-9 (consecutive) on the south east end of the street, was most likely based on Thomas Allason’s original plans, but the final design for most of the terraced housing on Kensington Park Gardens was radically adapted by Thomas Allom, who took Allason’s place as architectural adviser to the estate.
The south side of the street consisted almost entirely of detached trios of villas, unusually for the Ladbroke estate, where terraces and pairs of semi-detached villas are the norm. All back onto Ladbroke Square Garden. The north side is an extremely grand terrace, with a magnificent archway in the centre through to the Stanley Garden South communal garden.
