By the 1850s the Ladbroke family, who owned this land was beginning to sell off freehold parcels of undeveloped land, one of which consisted of the land between the south side of Arundel Gardens and the north side of Ladbroke Gardens.
This was acquired in 1852 by Richard Roy, a solicitor who had already been involved in building speculation in Cheltenham. He appears to have done nothing with the Arundel Gardens part of his land until 1862-3, when building leases were granted for the houses on the south side (numbers 1-47). Around the same time, leases were granted to three other builders to build houses on the north side (Edwin Ware for Nos. 2-14). The survey done by the Ordnance Survey in 1863 shows that the south side was complete by then, but only a few houses had been built on the north side, at the Kensington Park Road end. Building clearly proceeded apace, however, as an 1865 plan, done when the street was given its current name and numbers (it was originally called Lansdowne Road Terrace), shows that all the houses were complete by then. The building was not without accidents: a letter in the Times records that in 1865, when work was still being done on the interior of the houses at the Lansdowne Road end, a young boy living at 97 Lansdowne Road died when he fell into a temporary well built by the workmen under the pavement. There were also early problems with flooding. In 1888, a deputation from Arundel Gardens pressed the Metropolitan Board of Works to enquire into the flooding of over-charged main sewers.
From the beginning, the houses came with access to the communal “pleasure gardens”. In 1862, according to a deed in the London Metropolitan Archives, Richard Roy granted a 2,000 year lease of the land on the south side “to be used or enjoyed thenceforth during the said term as a pleasure garden in proper ornamental cultivation and condition for the exclusive use and benefit of the several freeholders and leaseholders and their several tenants and occupiers for the time being of the messsuages or tenements forming or being part of Ladbroke Gardens and Lansdowne Road Terrace and the respective families and servants of such owners and occupiers and their respective friends in their company”. The householders paid a guinea (£1.10) a year towards the cost of the garden.
The origin of the street name Arundel Gardens is not known. Arundel in Sussex is the seat of the Howard family, Dukes of Norfolk, and the name is common as a street name in areas that are or were owned by the Duke of Norfolk. That is not the case with this road.
