Phillimore Estate, Kensington

Campden House

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, a large country house with spacious grounds, later stood in this area. Sir Walter Cope had lived in it. About 1609 Sir Baptist Hicks bought the house and the estate. In 1628 Hicks was made Viscount Campden (a name he took from a manor he owned in Gloucestershire.) The family supported King Charles I in the Civil War, and the house and grounds (now called ‘Campden House’) were confiscated by Cromwell, but restored to the third Viscount in 1647 in return for a payment of £9,000. The fourth Viscount of Campden was promoted to Earl of Gainsborough in 1682.

The D’Oyley family

The third Earl of Gainsborough, sold the estate to Laud D’Oyley, a London merchant. D’Oyley had a son, Robert, and three illegitimate daughters. He died in 1709, leaving a respectable fortune and his Kensington land to his son, Robert. In 1710, Robert D’Oyley sold Campden House to Robert Balle, a merchant. (The sold-off land became the Pitt Estate.) But he kept most of the land. In 1716, he too died and left the property to his half-sister, Ann, for her lifetime and then to her children.

The early Phillimores

The terms of Robert D’Oyley’s Will were that Ann had the use of the property for her lifetime and on her death it passed to her sons. Ann had married Joseph Phillimore (who had died in 1704) and had two sons, John Phillimore and Robert Phillimore. Ann later remarried, this time to John Seymour. Her eldest son, John, died in 1730. So when Ann herself died in 1741, her remaining son, Robert Phillimore, inherited the estate.

For half a century and more after the family had originally acquired the land (in 1708) it remained farmland. Certainly during the 40 or so years that Robert Phillimore owned it, he did little more with it than let it out to farm tenants.

William Phillimore

In 1779, Robert’s eldest son, William Phillimore, inherited the estate. William was responsible for the first wave of development. One of the ancient roads out of London ran along the southern boundary of the estate. This road was later to be called Kensington High Street. A terrace of houses was built along this frontage and called Upper Phillimore Place. Apparently George III hated Upper Phillimore Place so much that he had the blinds pulled down on his carriage windows if he had to pass it; and he referred to it as “Dishcloth Row” because of the mouldings in the shape of drapery which decorated the houses facades. A similar terrace was built further to the east and called Lower Phillimore Place. These houses were all later replaced in the 20th century by three huge mansion blocks called Phillimore Court, Stafford Court and Troy Court. The land itself was later sold off to pay estate duties, so the Kensington High Street frontage no longer forms part of the Phillimore Estate.

In 1804, William Phillimore authorised more development in the area of today’s Hornton Street. The houses are long since gone. In 1946 Kensington Borough Council bought the Hornton Street site for the council’s offices.

A rather more exclusive development than the Kensington High Street terraces took place in the north half of the estate. In 1808 William Phillimore entered into an agreement with John Tasker, an architect and builder of St Marylebone, and Thomas Winter, a tailor in St James’s, under which they could build on the 19½ acres of farmland north of Duchess of Bedford’s Walk (roughly the present sites of Holland Park School and Queen Elizabeth College). The terms of the deal were that Phillimore would grant 81 year leases from 1808, at an annual ground rent of £438 (but starting at £116 to begin with). Tasker and Winter decided to build detached houses with spacious grounds and by 1817 they had completed the development and put up seven houses. William Phillimore was also involved in the development project. In 1812 he loaned £2,000 and lent a further £2,000 in 1815. Both loans were secured by mortgages on the leases of the buildings.

Charles Phillimore

William Phillimore died in 1818 and the Phillimore estate passed to his son, William Robert Phillimore. His only contribution to development of the estate was that he sold off four acres in the north-east of the estate, above Duchess of Bedford’s Walk, to Sir James South, an astronomer, in 1827. The Phillimore’s family mansion from earlier times had been on this site.

William Robert Phillimore died in 1829. He left his eldest son, also William Robert Phillimore, a large estate in Hertfordshire, which he had inherited from his wife’s family. He put the Kensington Estate was in a trust for the benefit of his younger son, Charles, but subject to an obligation to fund a payment of £5,000 to each of Charles’s two sisters.

Under Charles’s control, nothing much changed on the estate for the next twenty five years. But during that time a great deal of the surrounding countryside had been transformed into the Kensington we see today. He decided to jump on the bandwagon in about 1855 and the result was the building of the Phillimore Estate as it is today.

Joseph Gordon Davis, a builder involved in construction in Pimlico, took most of the undeveloped land south of Duchess of Bedford’s Walk, down to Upper and Lower Phillimore Place (so just north of Kensington High Street). On it were constructed Phillimore Gardens, Upper Phillimore Gardens, Phillimore Place, Essex Villas, Stafford Terrace, Phillimore Walk, Argyll Road and Campden Hill Road

The agreement allowed Davis to put up 375 houses. Phillimore agreed to grant leases for ninety nine years from 1855. The ground rent would be £1,400 a year for the whole site, but it would only rise to that after the first five years, to give Davis time to make some profit from letting or selling completed properties. A time limit of twelve years was imposed for completing the development.

It became clear over time that the density of housing which had been agreed was too great. In 1856, the permitted number of houses was reduced to 315 and it was agreed that none would be built along Duchess of Bedford’s Walk (presumably due to opposition from the rich owners of the detached houses on the other side!) In 1861 the total number was reduced again to a maximum of 225 and a minimum of 205. It seems that the terms Davis had originally negotiated contained enough profit to allow him to absorb these reductions. In the end, 214 houses were built. This was not necessarily loss to Davis. He was allowed to construct valuable detached and semi-detached villas, in place of the purely terraced houses originally stipulated.

The deal with Davis ultimately became the subject of a private Act of Parliament. William Robert Phillimore’s Will had stated that building leases could only be granted at the best rents and there was some argument that Charles had granted leases at less than full market rent to encourage construction. So an Act was needed to confirm the terms of the leases and to authorise further leases at rents low enough to encourage builders to undertake construction contracts.

The original building agreements with Davis had contained specific elevations and plans he had to adhere to. By the time of the 1861 Agreement, the obligation was diluted to simply requiring Charles Phillimore’s approval of particulars plans. It is not known who designed the general layout, or actually prepared or approved plans. Phillimore’s surveyor was Arthur Chesterton, and he probably did the approval work.

Davis did not plan to carry out all the work himself. As was customary at the time, he assigned parts of the project to other builders. One builder was James Jordan of Paddington, who built eleven houses on the west side of Campden Hill Road, went bankrupt, returned to build houses in Argyll Road, and went bust again in 1859. Another builder was Charles Frederick Phelps. Davis himself built most of the larger houses in Phillimore Gardens and Upper Phillimore Gardens.

Charles Phillimore died in 1863.

William Brough Phillimore

On the death of Charles Phillimore in 1863, the estate passed to his nephew, William Brough Phillimore.

In 1878, the lease of Elm Lodge, one of the detached houses built by Tasker and Winter, was surrendered by its owner, the Grand Junction Waterworks Company. This made the land available for development. Elm Lodge was demolished and Airlie Gardens was constructed on the site. Nineteen houses were built by William Cooke, a Hammersmith builder. All the houses were structurally complete by the end of 1883. William Brough Phillimore granted ninety nine year leases from 1880. The ground rent was to be £40 a year, after an initial period at nil rent. Cooke took most of the leases in his own name and raised finance for the development by mortgaging them.

Baron Phillimore

In 1887 William Brough Phillimore died. His widow benefited from the estate during her lifetime but they had no children, so when Mrs Phillimore died, the estate passed to one of William’s more distant relatives, Sir Walter George Frank Phillimore. Sir Walter was a descendant of Joseph Phillimore, the younger son of Robert Phillimore, one of the Phillimore owners of the previous century. Sir Walter was a famous lawyer and he was made Baron Phillimore in 1918. He was obviously a man of considerable energy, because he set about organising the re-building of many of the older houses with some gusto.

Bute House, one of Tasker and Winter’s detached houses just north of Duchess of Bedford’s Walk, became available, and was knocked down. Queen Elizabeth College was built on the part of the grounds nearest Duchess of Bedford’s Walk. Nos. 1 and 2 Campden Hill were built on the back portion of the site. Hornton Court was completed in 1907. After the First World War blocks of flats, Campden Hill Gate and Duchess of Bedford House were built.

Recent Phillimores

Baron Phillimore died in 1929. The Second Lord Phillimore died in 1947 and the Third in 1990. In each case death duties meant properties had to be sold and the whole of the land fronting Kensington High Street has now left the estate. The property must have been placed in a family trust to avoid the pattern being repeated. Two of the sons of the Second Earl, Claud and Robert Phillimore were among the trustees. Claud became the Fourth Earl on the death of his father. The present Lord Phillimore, the Fifth Earl, is also involved in the running of the estate.

During the war, many of the large detached houses, which still remained north of Duchess of Bedford’s Walk, were requisitioned for war purposes and allowed to fall into disrepair. In 1948 London County Council used compulsory purchase orders to buy Cam House, Moray Lodge, and Thorp Lodge for high-rise Council flats, but bowed to local pressure and instead Holland Park School was built on the site in 1958. The remaining houses, Holly Lodge and Thornwood Lodge, were absorbed by Queen Elizabeth College.

 


This forms part of a guide to Kensington Streets which first appeared on the, now defunct, Kensington Living website.

All rights and copyright to the original material is retained by that website.

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