This is a placeholder for the upcoming conservation guides to the LBKC. The sources may be found here:Kensington and Chelsea
AVONDALE CONSERVATION AREA
Avondale Conservation Area is an attractive residential area which was primarily developed from around 1860 to 1895. The cluster of buildings comprises modest Victorian terrace houses, a church and school which are in stark contrast to the more historically affluent areas of the Borough where larger and grander terraces and municipal buildings were constructed. The area forms an important part of the Borough’s architectural history and is a clear visual reminder of the different social dynamics within the Borough at that time.
The area is residential in character with only a couple of shops on Mary Place. The picturesque St. Clement’s Church is a prominent building whose bell cast copula and clock can be seen in glimpse views from many parts of the conservation area. This along with the early 20th century Avondale Park School give the area a ‘village’ like atmosphere.
The vast majority of dwellings form terraces with only a small number being built as flats in the latter part of the 20th century. The houses range in height between 2 and 3 storeys and were constructed from either London stock or gault brickwork with simple terracotta moulded string courses, slate roofs and vertical sliding glazing bar sash windows.
The houses date from the early 1920s and are constructed from London stock brick with slate roofs in short terraces and vertically sliding glazing bar sash widows. The houses within the southeast corner of the area were designed in the Arts and Crafts style. These are also constructed from London stock brick but incorporate contrasting Dutch gables and red clay roof tiles and painted steel casement windows.
Despite various unsympathetic alterations, the area’s original “Homes for Heroes” character has remained, creating a comfortable housing development with mature green spaces which combine to create an attractive residential enclave in a heavily built up and populated environment.
AVONDALE PARK GARDENS
Avondale Park Gardens lies between the Norland and St. Quintins Estates. In the 19th century, potteries and kilns were established nearby with a 16 acre site, including the present conservation area, providing one of the raw materials, clay. This in-salubrious start was worsened by the rapid influx of shady inhabitants moved on by development elsewhere and the deplorable activities of a colony of pig keepers. As early as 1838, lack of sewerage, stagnant pools and resulting levels or mortality and disease had attracted the attention of the Poor Law Commissioners.
Half-hearted attempts to solve the problems, noted by contemporary authors as amongst the worst in London, included the opening of the Mary Place Workhouse and Dispensary, the provision of sewers by the 1860s, the eviction of the pig keepers in 1878, and a long term policy of inspection and enforced improvement. The general conditions however, hardly improved and as late as 1904 it was noted that women and children admitted to the workhouse needed to be disinfected outside.
The 1919 Housing Act allowed further Local Authority initiatives and in 1920, Kensington Borough Council purchased the Workhouse for £5,000 in order to erect a quadrangle of 20 cottages and two blocks of flats. By 1922 the cottages around the square were occupied but the scheme was altered and cottages, not flats, were erected facing Mary Place. With the enclosing of the garden square in 1923, the development was complete.
The cottages cost, on average, £1,108 and were rented out for between 15s.9d and 18s.9d per week. One stipulation was that each family had to have a minimum of four children. The standard lay-out provided three bedrooms, a living room, kitchen, parlour, scullery, bathroom and toilet.
IVORY HOUSE (1987)
Constructed on former builder’s yard between 20 and 21 Treadgold Street.
BOMORE ROAD
Between 1870s-1890s terraced houses were built in Bomore Road.
Post war developments have altered some of the original Victorian street plan. Bomore Road was moved south for the construction of Treadgold House and the leisure centre.
GRENFELL ROAD
The buildings within the Avondale Conservation Area were laid out between 1860 and 1895 on former brickfields owned by Stephen Bird, one of the most notable builders and brick makers of Kensington. The houses were built speculatively by Bird when the clay deposits had been worked out. The houses originally proved hard to sell due to their location adjacent to a slum area and were gradually let out floor by floor and room by room to tenants.
The vast majority of houses form terraces with only a small number being built as flats in the latter part of the 20th century. The terraced houses built between the 1860s and 1895 have a repetitive arrangement within each range, with all houses having the front door and entrance hall arranged in pairs within the terrace group.
The design of many terraces is often unique to that particular group. Features seen in one group may not appear on another.
MARY PLACE
Avondale Park Primary School dates from the early 20th century and is of a London yellow stock brick construction laid in English bond with red brick dressings around the windows including rubbed brick arches, those of the first floor are half rounded with London stock brick infill. The windows are of timber construction with paired vertical sliding glazing bar sash windows with central pivoted top opening lights. The main entrance facing Sirdar Road comprises a single storey gable fronted projection with stone dressings, red tiled roof and sash windows.
NOTTING DALE
At the same time as houses were springing up over Kensington for the comfortable middle class, one corner of the borough was developing into a slum whose notoriety was probably unsurpassed throughout London.
It lay at the foot of the hill on which the Ladbroke estate was laid out, directly north of Pottery Lane, on badly draining clay soil between the Norland Estate and Notting Barns Farm. Its first occupants were to give it two infamous names: the brick makers, who seemed to have arrived in the late 18th century, and the pig-keepers, who moved there in the early 19th century.
To make bricks and tiles involved large excavations, which soon filled with stagnant water. The keeping of pigs entailed collecting refuse and offal from the kitchens of hotels and private houses, feeding most of it to the pigs and boiling down the fat. The combination of both bricks and pigs was an unfortunate combination for the area.
Samuel Lake of Tottenham Court Road, a scavenger and chimney sweep by occupation was the first to keep pigs here and he was soon joined by the pig keepers of Tyburn who had been forced out of their area by building development. The colony was at first sufficiently isolated to be able to go about their business unfettered; and by the time streets were being built nearby, the piggeries were so well established that developers simply steered clear.
Shacks sprang up wherever convenient for there was no building control in London at that time, and inevitably they were jumbled together with the pigs and the ponds: indeed often the three were combined, with humans sharing their roofs with animals and living directly over stagnant water, the animals at one stage outnumbered people by three to one.
There were no building restrictions, no sanitary regulations, and no drainage. Hovels, sheds and huts were the main dwellings of this squalid area, which stank of pigs and pigswill.
By 1840 the colony consisted mainly of two streets and side alleys bounded by Darnley Terrace and Treadgold Street. In the middle of this acreage was a pool of fetid water known as the ‘ocean’.
The area’s decline was swift and it soon became a refuge for a variety of dubious characters. Later when the Hammersmith and City Line was built across the area in the 1860s navvies moved into poorer boarding houses in the neighbourhood and gypsies often camped there.
The sewage authorities were unable to cope with the scale of the problem so when cholera struck in 1849 its toll on the population was high. The mortality rate reached 60 per 1000 living, compared with the average for London 1846-50, of 25.4 per 1000, and 45 deaths out of every 50 were of children under the age of 5. Life expectancy in this area was a shocking 11 years 7 months compared with the metropolitan average of 37 years.
The area’s unsanitary conditions had become so notorious that Charles Dickens ran a special feature on it in the 1st edition issue of his magazine, “Household Words
The piggeries and brickyards were far from the sight and concern of the Vestry and its duties were taken up by charities, both religious and secular. But it was Kensington’s first Medical Officer of Health, Dr Francis Goodrich, who was given the formidable task of cleaning up the area, Goodrich stated “it was one of the most deplorable spots not only in Kensington but in the whole of the metropolis.”
The brickyards now concentrated more on the making of pottery, mostly drainpipes, tiles and flower pots to supply the local boom. This trade, however, gradually declined and business ceased by 1863, the same time as when the stagnant ‘ocean’ was filled in.
As far as the piggeries were concerned strong opposition to a clean up came from the pig keepers themselves, as that was their livelihood. Perversely the Vestry did not want them to lose the pigs because the families then could become a charge on the Poor Rate.
By 1878 Goodrich’s successor Dr Dudfield managed, however, to gradually reduce the number of pigs (by making it Hammersmith’s problem). However, it was not until the 1890s that the last pig was banished.
The area nevertheless remained notorious. Instead of pig keeping the men turned to living off what their women could earn as laundresses, initially at home (especially in Stoneleigh Street area) and later in small laundries. A local saying in this area declared that ‘to marry an ironer is as good as a fortune’.
But change was coming: the 1860s at last witnessed the opening of the schools, (such as one in Sirdar Road), the paving of streets and the construction of proper sewers. But it was not until 1888 were public baths and washhouses provided at the junction of Silchester and Lancaster Roads.
In 1889 the Rev C. E. Roberts of St. Clements Church and Rev Dr Thornton of St Johns appealed in a letter to the Times for an open space for the children of this area. As a result the old Brickfield and the area of the Ocean became the start of Avondale Park opened in 1892 and named in memory of the recently deceased Duke of Clarence and Avondale.
But even then, a year after the park was opened, the Daily News described the area adjacent to the park as ‘Avernus’ (the fabled gateway to hell!). The article identified Wilsham Street, Kenley Street, another two streets now replaced by Henry Dickens Court and part of Sirdar Road as ‘hopelessly degraded and abandoned’.
The dense rows of artisan houses in these streets were massively over occupied or else were the most primitive lodging houses in which a bed on the floor cost a few pennies per night. Local residents made a living as best they could but it was a close knit community who seemed to scrape together enough money to pay for visits to the music hall and for summer day trips.
When Kensington Vestry was superseded by Kensington Borough Council it rapidly appointed four extra inspectors and bought up dwellings for improvement. In 1896-8 the death rate for Notting Dale Special Area stood at 50.4 per 1000. By 1907 it had been cut to 30.2.
By 1904 new low cost tenements were built and in 1900 the Improved Tenements Association bought 64 year leases for four houses in Walmer Road. These were modernised and divided into two room tenements to accommodate 13 families for rents of 5 shillings a week. Other housing associations followed such as the Wilsham Trust formed by ladies-in-waiting at Kensington Palace.
Since then the area has been largely improved and redeveloped: Kenley Street has been re-built and Henry Dickens (grandson of Charles) Court went up after the Second World War as did Treadgold House, Bomore Road and other solid examples of public housing.
Today, this part of Kensington, however, is still somewhat of a hidden secret, strangely cut off, tucked behind the facade of the Norland estate and bordered by the railway.
The poverty and hardship of the Potteries and Piggeries is very much a thing of the past. Now the neighbourhood is an attractive, leafy, peaceful backwater made up of rows of well kept two and three storey Victorian brick terraced houses and cottages, in the shadow of the graceful golden weather vane and clock of St. Clements.
SIRDAR ROAD
STONELEIGH STREET
Between 1870s-1890s terraced houses were built in Stoneleigh Street, Sirdar Road, Treadgold Street, Bomore Road and Grenfell Road.
ST CLEMENT’S CHURCH
St. Clement’s Church was constructed in 1867 by J. P. St Aubyn and is an unusual example of a picturesque Anglo-Catholic church. The church is constructed from stock brick with red brick patterning and stone dressings. The roof has a covering of Welsh slates with tiny timber ventilating dormers with three holed crested red ridge tiles and a bell-cast cupola with clock. The church has an unusual plan with a three bay nave opening to double transepts, which narrows to an elevated three-bay chancel. The church was later altered in the early twentieth century with the addition of vestries and a side chapel. The church has a regular fenestration of two lancets per bay under a plate traceried roundel, each bay of the nave and transept under its own gable, with three-lancet east windows and four-centred cusped lights to vestries.
The Vicarage to the south of St. Clement’s Church dates from the 1920s and is constructed from a red multi stock brick laid in Flemish bond with struck pointing.
ST MARY’S WORKHOUSE
The 1870s saw the opening of St. Marys Place Workhouse / Dispensary.
St Mary’s Workhouse was demolished and 32 terraced houses were built on the site.
TREADGOLD STREET
In 1867, St Clements Church built on the south side of Treadgold Street.
The erection of St Clement’s Church was followed closely by the terraced houses in Stoneleigh Street, Sirdar Road, Treadgold Street, Grenfell Road and the south side of Mary Place between 1870 and 1895.
Post war developments have altered some of the original Victorian street plan. This is most noticeable with the shortening and blocking off of the eastern end of Treadgold Street and the north end of Ansleigh Place for the construction of Saint Francis of Assisi School.