The Norland estate had been 52 acres of ground, bounded on the east by the streets now known as Portland Road and Pottery Lane, on the south by Holland Park Avenue. By the mid 1830s, Norland was looking attractive for speculative building.
In 1836, the incorporation of the Birmingham, Bristol and Thames Junction Railway occurred. The company proposed the construction of a line from Willesden to the Kensington Canal. The route authorised was north-south a few yards outside the western boundary of the Norland estate, across the Uxbridge Road at Shepherd’s Bush.
Drainage problems posed by the construction of the railway promoted the development of the Norland Estate. Between the Uxbridge and Hammersmith roads the railway was to extend along or very close to the course of the Counter’s Creek sewer, the natural open ditch which discharged surface water into the Kensington Canal. In 1837–8 the Westminster Commissioners of Sewers insisted that the railway company must divert Counter’s Creek and improve drainage.
The new sewer, as built by the railway company during 1838–9, extended along the line of the present Holland Road and Holland Villas Road, across the Uxbridge Road at the centre of Royal Crescent, and then across the present St Ann’s Villas.
The effect of this diversion was to provide landowner Benjamin Lewis Vulliamy with greatly improved drainage facilities for his estate, at no cost to himself. In September 1838, when discussions between the Commissioners of Sewers and the railway company were still proceeding, he was negotiating the sale of the Norland Estate. A solicitor, Charles Richardson, paid £19 990 to become the freehold owner of all fifty-two acres of the estate.
Richardson had no difficulty in raising capital for the development of his housing scheme. By 1844 his total liabilities amounted to about £45 000, much of the money being needed for loans to builders and for the construction of nearly three miles of sewers.
The layout plan of the southern part of the estate was the work of Robert Cantwell. Cantwell designed a large crescent facing the Uxbridge Road, broken in the centre by a north-south road, St Ann’s Villas and St Ann’s Road – an arrangement occasioned by the need for unobstructed passage for the recently diverted Counter’s Creek sewer. Without the needed access to the sewer, St Ann’s Villas and St Ann’s Road would not exist. Current residents are no doubt unaware that both a sewer runs underneath their wonderfully-designed houses and that their houses’ existence is due to the wonders of effluence.
The developer of St Ann’s Villas itself was Charles Stewart, a wealthy barrister who had served as an MP in the early 1830s. Between 1840 and 1846 he took building leases from Richardson with his principal ventures being in Royal Crescent (where he had 43 houses) and St Ann’s Villas (34 houses). The Stewart Arms public house on Norland Road commemorates his name.
Charles Stewart put up terraces on either side of the street in 1843: Numbers 2-10 on the east side and numbers 1-9 on the west side. Each terrace contained five houses in a style of Tudor-Gothic and each house was four storeys high. Red and blue bricks were used with Bath stone for the quoins and window mullions. The section nearest Royal Crescent was called Darnley Road for a time.
In 1845 Stewart began work on the next section, between Queensdale Road and St James’s Gardens. Each side contained six pairs of houses: numbers 11-33 on the west and numbers 12-34 on the east side of the road.
St Ann’s Villas also contains some unusual three-storey detached houses, constructed in brown brick, of Victorian Gothic design.
