Notting Hill in Bygone Days: The Bayswater End and Portobello Road

Notting Dale Notting Hill in Bygone Days
by Florence Gladstone
Kensal New Town

Bayswater owes its name to Baynard, companion in arms to William the Conqueror, to whom was granted land in Paddington, which he held from the Abbots of Westminster. Bays Water, a corruption of Baynard’s Watering, is a name given to the upper reaches of the Westbourne. This stream began its course at Kilburn and was augmented by springs rising on Craven Hill. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a tiny hamlet stood ” one mile from London on the road to Uxbridge,” near the beehive-shaped conduit house known as the Bayswater or Roundhead Conduit. But, as building spread westwards along the high road, Bayswater was adopted as the name of the whole quarter between Craven Hill and the turnpike at Notting Hill Gate.’ It is true that Mr. John Whyte advertised his race-course as the Hippodrome, Bayswater. This was incorrect, and was evidently done to minimize its distance from town.

Groups of buildings at "Bayswater End". Drawing by Miss Ethel Woolmer.

Groups of buildings at “Bayswater End”. Drawing by Miss Ethel Woolmer.

The present chapter deals with the portion of Kensington parish lying east of Portobello Lane, from Uxbridge Road on the south to the line of the Hammersmith and City Railway on the north. Much of this district is still described by its inhabitants as Bayswater, whilst, curiously enough, the name of Kensington Park was often used for the new quarter north of Westbourne Grove after it had ceased to be applied to the Hippodrome Estate. ” So eminently Bayswatery a neighbourhood as that of Pembridge Square and Chepstow Place is in Kensington parish,” writes Mr. Lloyd Sanders. But, although it has become the fashion to decry ” the rigid and undeviating respectability of Bayswater . . . the horrors of its Mid-Victorian architecture . . . and the hardly less terrifying ” interiors of its houses, these houses are generally well planned according to the ideals of the fifties and sixties, and most of them are well built.

A drawing, dated 1842, made from the garden of one of Moscow Cottages, on the north side of Moscow Road, shows ” mere country ; bright sweeping green expanses ” stretching away to the north. Westbourne Grove crosses the drawing as a country lane with a few scattered houses. The division between the parishes of Kensington and Paddington was still an open ditch, running behind the houses of Victoria Grove, now Ossington Street, which forms the present boundary line. The ditch then skirted the garden wall of Grove House which stood at the west end of Moscow Road, just within the parish of Paddington. Some forty years ago a blocked-up drain was discovered in the garden of No. 17, now No. 20, Pembridge Square ; which certainly was part of this ditch. The further course of the ditch can be followed by blocks of granite, with incised dates, imbedded in the pavement at frequent intervals. Probably few passers-by are conscious of these boundary marks. (Grove House itself was not pulled down until 1900, though the beautiful garden, with its orchard and a stone-rimmed pool overhung by a fine mulberry tree, was parcelled out among the houses at the east end of Pembridge Square about the year 1869. There is a tradition that Captain Marryat, the novelist, once lived in this strangely planned house. See illustration page 166.) Westbourne Grove ended at Richmond Road, built 1848, where the omnibuses now cross. Here within living memory was a hedge broken by a stile.

Slightly to the north of the Grove stood the ” Princess Royal ” tavern, now 47, Hereford Road. It was started in the early forties by Mr. James Bott, whose name is perpetuated in Bott’s Mews off Richmond Road. The Princess Royal ” possessed a bowling green and tea-rooms, a fish-pond and archery ground, where ” any gentleman might practise archery from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. for ten shillings a year.” Another alluring attraction was that ” the grounds led by the nearest way to Kensal Green Cemetery.” The public footpath crossing the tavern garden no doubt connected Paddington with Portobello Lane and Notting Barns Farm. See page 76. In the early forties the part of Mr. Ladbroke’s Notting Hill Estate between Notting Hill Toll Gate and Westbourne Grove, was in the hands of a William Howard. In 1844 Mr. James Weller Ladbroke let twenty-eight acres of this land, known as Longlands and the Hooks, to Mr. William H. Jenkins, who undertook to form roads, make sewers, and build eighty or more houses. Leases for ninety-nine years were to be granted at a peppercorn rent, and it was stipulated that no dwelling-house was to be of less value than £300. In 1847, Mr. Felix Ladbroke came into the property and sold Longlands and the Hooks ” at or near Notting Hill,” along with the Westbourne Grove Estate and the Kensal Town Estate, to William K. Jenkins, heir to William H. Jenkins. Pembridge Villas and Chepstow Villas were already planned and named, and were crossed by Denbigh Road, which included what is now Pembridge Crescent, and Ledbury Road, with Ledbury and Adelaide Terraces, now called Chepstow Crescent.

But several years elapsed before these roads filled up with houses. Mr. W. K. Jenkins, a lawyer well-known in his day, lived in Westbourne Grove, the site of the house being now covered by Owen’s Drapery Stores. He owned property in Hereford, and, as streets were laid out on the Westbourne Grove Estate and at this Bayswater end of Notting Hill, he gave them the names of places in Herefordshire and the neighbouring parts of Wales : Hereford, Monmouth, Newton, the River Garway, and Chepstow, Pembridge, Ledbury and Denbigh. Mr. W. K. Jenkins was succeeded by his son who became Canon Jenkins. It has been suggested that ” a lane or perhaps merely a track along one side of a hedge,” crossed Portobello Lane by the line of Chepstow Villas and Kensington Park Gardens.

If Chepstow Villas really followed the course of a field-path, Pembridge Villas connected the Westbourne Grove end of this path with Albert Place, and Notting Hill Gate. See page 121. Houses at the north end of Pembridge Place and part of Chepstow Place belong to the late forties. Other houses in Chepstow Place were built about 1855 by John Treadaway, a tailor of Old Paddington Green, who had made money through selling clothing to the navvies employed on the Great Western Railway line. His object in 1855 was to provide work to meet the distress caused by the Crimean War. Both sides of Chepstow Place were then in Kensington parish.

In 1852, the house now No. 23, Pembridge Villas, then No. 28, was included in the marriage portion of Mrs. Everard, formerly Arabella Matilda Amboise, and was called Amboise Mansion. No. 7, Pembridge Villas, then No. 10, was inhabited for a short time by a Greek family, before W. P. Frith, R.A., moved in with his wife and five children, towards the end of 1852. A charming picture painted by Frith, of himself and his wife in the studio of this house, may be seen in the National Portrait Gallery. ” Pembridge Castle ” was, and still is, the name of a public-house in Ledbury Road, and “Pembroke Hotel ” was established in 1852 at the junction of Pembridge and Chepstow Villas. But about 1864 its license was stopped by means of a petition signed by neighbouring householders, and for many years the premises were used as a florist’s shop. A study of the map of 1850 on page 120, shows the amount of building that had taken place in the parallelogram or gridiron of streets, lying between Richmond Road and Ledbury Road, just beyond the limits of North Kensington. Artesian Road (see page 66), was then Westbourne Grove North, and the continuation of Westbourne Grove was for many years known as Norfolk Terrace and Archer Street.

A brickfield owned by Mr. Bolton had covered the site of Archer Street and Bolton Road. The open ground between the end of Westbourne Grove and this brickfield seems to have been a recognized battle-ground. Boys from the village of Hammersmith and boys from the village of Paddington would fight here for the honour of their respective localities. Parochial or district fights between youths were of frequent occurrence two generations ago, and encounters between the boys of Kensal Road and Lisson Grove were organized up to the end of the nineteenth century. About 1850 a plank had to be placed across the open boundary ditch when an inhabitant of Norfolk Terrace wished to reach Norfolk Road Villas. Since 1900 the boundary has run along Ledbury Road. Boundary Mews has thus ceased to mark the division of the parishes. On the Paddington side of the boundary line a quiet gentleman of literary tastes lived from 1854 to 1891 in a house on the site of No. 118-120 Westbourne Grove. This was Prince Louis Lucien Buonaparte. Buonaparte Mansions perpetuate his memory. (His widow, Princess Clemence Buona-parte, was still in the neighbourhood at the time of her death in November 1915.) In /85o there was open ground between Pembridge Villas and the houses of Linden Grove and Campden Place. Several houses on the north side of Dawson Place date from about 1852. A tradition exists that No. 28 covers the site of Dawson’s Farm, but no such farm appears on the maps. It seems more probable that the name is derived from Mr. John Silvester Dawson who, perhaps, rented the fields which bordered on the Gravel Pits Estate. See page 91. It was well on in the eighteen-fifties before Messrs. John and Joseph Radford bought Elm Lodge, and converted its fine grounds into the double row of detached houses known as Pembridge Gardens. They afterwards acquired the remaining piece of land, and between 1862 and about 1866, mansions were gradually erected round the garden of Pembridge Square, whilst others on a similar plan were being built in Holland Park. It is evident that the Radford brothers adopted the name of Pembridge from Pembridge Place and Pembridge Villas. The completion of Pembridge Square was retarded until about 1870 by the con-struction of the Metropolitan Railway. This line passed under three unfinished houses at the south-east corner. These houses were supported by iron girders inserted beneath their kitchen floors. The Greek and the Jewish Communities have always been well represented in the group of streets bearing the name of Pembridge, and many interesting persons have lived in this locality. Probably the resident of Pembridge Square most worthy of note is Field-Marshal Sir John Fox Burgoyne, Constable of the Tower. ” The great engineer, Commander in the Peninsular, in France and in the Crimea,” a fine distinguished figure, was at No. 5 at the time of his death, in 1871. Edward Middleton Barry, the architect, lived for several years at No. 14, the house afterwards used as St. Luke’s Hospital for the Dying. (Other Institutions have occupied these solid houses. Many of them are now converted into flats or residential hotels.) The scene of a somewhat sad story by Rita is laid in Pembridge Square, and shows an intimate acquaintance with the neighbourhood in the late sixties. Another interesting account of Mid-Victorian days in this locality is given in Leaves from a Life ; this book describes the simple lighthearted existence of the Frith family in Pembridge Villas from 1852 onwards. W. P. Frith’s daughter tells of the alarm caused about 1857 by garotters : Notting Hill having an evil reputation for crimes of garotting. She mentions the dense black fogs of those days, and portrays many of their neighbours and the artistic and literary people with whom the family associated, including those, from royalty downwards, who visited her father’s studio. Guy Fawkes was much in fashion two generations ago, and guys are mentioned in the reminiscences of various inhabitants. Another old custom survived here until well on in the seventies. This was ” Jack in the Green,” attended by a group of sweeps dressed up as clowns or as girls, who danced and played and begged from the passer-by. Jack’s extinguisher-shaped frame covered with leaves was probably a decadent form of the Mavpole, and it is interesting to find in Hone’s Every Day Book, of 1827, that Bayswater was one of the suburbs ” enlivened by the May Dance and the Jack o’ the Green.”

It is in this part of North Kensington that G. K. Chesterton centres his whimsical farce entitled ” The Napoleon of Notting Hill.” The story is of a tragic struggle between the armies of the various parishes or Free Cities of Western London. The ” Holy Mountain ” in this book was evidently Campden Hill. But the description of Pump Street, which Adam Wayne, the idealist and Lord High Provost of Notting Hill, refused to surrender in order that a road of ” corridor for trade ” might be run through from Hammersmith to Westbourne Grove, recalls the little old shops in Notting Hill Gate ; though Pump Street,, itself, is an imaginary road connecting Clanricarde Gardens with Pembridge Square. Before passing to Portobello Road and the north side of Archer Street the older places of worship in this district must be mentioned. These are Horbury Congregational Chapel, built in 1849, which was included in the chapter on Kensington Park, though just outside the Hippodrome enclosure, Westbourne Grove Baptist Chapel and the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Denbigh Road. Westbourne Grove Baptist Chapel dates from 1853, but it has a history going back for one hundred years.

In 1823 a small Baptist Chapel had been erected in the village of Kensington Gravel Pits. During the tenure of office of its fifth pastor, the Rev. W. G. Lewis, ” Silver Street Chapel ” became overcrowded ; so the congregation prepared for themselves the striking building with octagonal turrets at the corner of Norfolk Terrace and Ledbury Road. Under the direction of Mr. Lewis a large and powerful church grew up in the new premises. Additions to the building were made in 1859 and 1866, and again in 188o shortly before Mr. Lewis’s death. (Since t 890 this chapel has been just outside the parish boundary ; as is the neigh-bouring Roman Catholic Church in Westmoreland Road, which was also in course of construction in 1853. This church, St. Mary and the Angels, was served successively by Cardinal Wiseman and Cardinal Manning.) The third of the older churches, Denbigh Road Chapel with a classic facade dated 1856, was erected by a body of Wesleyans who previously had worshipped in Queen’s Road, and they used the building whilst still in an unfinished state. In 1861 it became the centre of the Bayswater Circuit. A distinguished series of pastors have preached within its walls, including the Rev. William Archer and Dr. Morley Punshon. In the eighteen-sixties and seventies all these places of worship were filled to overflowing by congregations of thoughtful and influential people.

Portobello Lane has already been described as a rustic footpath connecting the village of Kensington Gravel Pits with the Harrow Road. The south end, near the Notting Hill Toll Gate, was considerably altered during the period of the Hippodrome. Then came the building of Albert Place which was connected with the new curved road called Pembridge Villas, so that, since about the year 1845 ” the Lane ” has only started from the sharp bend where it now abuts on Pembridge Road. Probably the ” Sun in Splendour ” at this corner belongs to the early fifties. This public-house had on its cornice a massive rising sun with golden rays, until this cornice was blown down with fatal results some twenty years ago. The ” Earl of Lonsdale,” No. 16, Archer Street, was an earlier building, and seems to have been in existence before 1850. Small houses were growing up along the lane between these taverns, houses which still have a countrified appearance, but in 1850, with the exception of Portobello Farm, there were no buildings north of Archer Street. Compare the map of 1850 on page 120 with the larger scale map of about 1855 on page 172. This second map gives the original names of many roads, and of terraces now merged in the general numbering of the streets. Before 1855 Bolton’s brickfield had been built over. Bolton Road and Western and Buckingham Terraces with Lonsdale Road formed communications with Westbourne Grove and Ledbury Road. Later on Buckingham Terrace was largely swallowed up by the elementary school of that name, opened in 1879.

This group of streets included several cab and omnibus Mews, and the inhabitants were chiefly labourers, horse-keepers and horse-feeders, with a shifting mass of those sorry folk who have come down and down in the world ” till their home is a loft in some mews patronized by cabmen.” All the elements were present for the development of the degraded conditions of to-day. In 1862 there was a Ragged School in Lonsdale Mews, now called Colville Mews, which was succeeded by All Saints parochial schools. The name of another church is here introduced, but some earlier glimpses can be obtained of the land subsequently included in this new parochial district. It has been stated 9 that, about the year 1841, ” pieces ” of the Hippodrome ” were sliced off to form streets and thoroughfares which lie to the north of Westbourne Grove and south of the Great Western Railway,” and that St. Stephen’s Church, Westbourne Park, covers part of the site. It is needless to say that the race-course never extended east of Portobello Lane. The myth arose from combining the Hippodrome with one of the later and smaller pleasure grounds. It appears that a Mr. Jackson bought two fields in Westbourne Green which were to be devoted to racing and open-air amusements ; but the fields had to be relinquished for the extension of the premises of the Great Western Railway Co. The land to the immediate south, lying between the chancel end of St. Stephen’s and Portobello Road, was then obtained.

The whole of this land belonged to the Talbot family (see page 58), and Talbot Road is said to represent the central long axis of the oval race-course. Mr. George Hitchcock, who lived when a boy in Norfolk Terrace, states that in 1849 or 1850 fairs were held on this ground, and a balloon was sent up from part of the field now covered by the Church of St. Mary and the Angels. This open space was often called the Hippodrome, but the proper name seems to have been Portobello Gardens. In the Illustrated London News of June 7, 1851, reference is made to the destruction of a balloon after an ascent from the Portobello Gardens on October 14, 1844. Unfortunately neither the year, nor any indication of the position of the ground is given on a handbill announcing Mr. Gypson’s ” Third and Last Balloon Ascent ” for the season from Portobello Gardens ; to be held at 7 p.m. on Monday, July 24th : ” On which occasion the whole process of inflation may be witnessed by Visitors, as it will be altogether Inflated in the Gardens with pure Hydrogen Gas, having sufficient power for carrying up Two persons.” This display was to be followed at half-past nine o’clock by a ” Grand Representation of the Roman Festa, with Military Music, etc.” One shilling was charged for admission.

As building advanced the available open space was curtailed, and by 1852 even the most northern part had to be given up. In 1852 the Rev. Dr. Walker (who was then building houses in Clarendon Road, see page 119) bought from the Misses Mary Anne and Georgina Charlotte Talbot fifty-one acres of Portobello farm-land. This covered the whole strip of North Kensington lying east of Portobello Lane from Portobello farm-house on the north to Lonsdale Road and Western Terrace on the south. On this land which joined the ” Ladbrooke Estate,” Dr. S. Edmund Walker commenced to build ” a new town ” and erect an elaborate church to the memory of his parents. The road on which the church was built was called St. Columb’s Road, and the church was dedicated to St. Ann, but the name of ” All Saints ” was soon substituted.’

This ” very stately and abnormal stone church, built after the model of that at St. Columb’s Major in Cornwall, from the design of William White, was structurally completed in 1855, but owing to pecuniary difficulties was left without glass or furniture till 1861.” Meanwhile it stood boarded up and weed-grown near a pond, the open ground behind being sometimes occupied by gipsies. A footpath which started beside the church, for some years after this date, led over fields all the way to Kensal Green. In 1861 Dr. Walker finished the church in a less costly manner, and presented the living to the Rev. John Light. But already it was known as Walker’s Folly, and was sometimes irreverently called ” All Sinners in the Mud.” The clustered columns of English marbles, the great east window and other beautiful structural details belong to the earlier period. Dr. Walker had intended to crown the tower, one hundred feet high, by a spire as lofty as that of Salisbury Cathedral. But ” when the tower itself had just been completed a settlement made its appearance . . . and work had to be stopped . . . on what would otherwise have been one of the very finest towers and spires in the country.” ” The nobly proportioned tower, whose outline recalls that of Ghent,” when seen at sunset against the western sky is, perhaps, the most beautiful object in the whole of North Kensington. See illustration on page 166. The land lying south and east of the new church between Ledbury Road, Lonsdale Road and Portobello Lane, was eventually bought by Mr. Tibbetts and became Tibbetts’ Brick Fields.

A gate stood where Talbot Road crosses Ledbury Road. Mr. Hitchcock, already referred to, was lost in this brickfield as a small child about the year 1856. And another friend can recall how, in 1860 or 1861, after watching her father who was laying the tiles in ” All Saints,” she was shut into the church, from which she was rescued by the night-watchman. The Messrs. Tibbetts are said to have built most of the Colville and Powis Square houses and the adjacent residential streets which were gradually covering the All Saints Fields. The names of Powis and Arundel arc derived from the titles of the Earls of Shrewsbury and Talbot.

While this district east of Portobello Lane was in course of development, the lane itself had become what with little exaggeration has been described as ” the Market Centre of Kensington.” Until 1864 there were scarcely any buildings along the road. The first house, now No. 223a, Portobello Road, for several years stood alone and unfinished. It was known as ” The Folly,” and the name is perpetuated in Folly Mews. A shop has been built over the front garden. Formerly this house was a laundry with fields which stretched down to Ladbroke Grove. The ” Warwick Castle ” at the corner of Cornwall Road, is the successor of a small inn of the same name ; and opposite the inn, across Portobello Lane, was a cattle-pond at the edge of a field. In the early sixties there was also a two-storied country inn called the ” Ben Jonson.”

By 1872 houses and shops stood in an almost continuous line on each side of the road. It is in this part of the road that Portobello Market takes place : one of the distinctive characteristics of Notting Hill, and ” of general London notoriety.” (Even as late as 1919 the stalls hardly extended beyond the railway arch.) In a pamphlet, published in 1909, the statement is made that ” the market was established some eighty or ninety years ago.” 14 This is obviously incorrect. Two old ladies belonging to the coster fraternity, each about seventy years of age in 1916, had been amongst the earliest traders. Certainly this market did not exist before the early sixties, therefore some fifteen years after ” the Market ” commenced in Norland Road. Sir William Bull (see note 5), describes the scene from a boy’s point of view. ” Columbus discovered Porto Bello in 1502. ‘We discovered Portobello Road about 370 years later. Carnival time was on Saturday nights in the winter, when it was thronged like a fair from Cornwall Road to Bolton Road. The people overflowed from the pavement so that the roadway was quite impassable for horse traffic which, to do it justice, never appeared. On the left-hand side (the east side) were costers’ barrows, lighted by flaming naphtha lamps. In the side streets were side-shows,” vendors of patent medicines, conjurers, itinerant vocalists, etc.

Many an older inhabitant of Notting Hill has come to shop in ” the Lane,” not only for the sake of the excellent quality of the food sold there, but also for sheer enjoyment of the cheery cries and the surging crowds and heavily laden stalls, ” where in the lamplight sepia pavements shine, and the blue naphtha flames upon the stall.” ” Here one can see,” writes Mr. Woolf, mechanic and artisan life in its best and truest form . . . the happy and sturdy husband with pipe in mouth, looking after his children, perhaps with one on his shoulder, whilst his better half is bargaining for the Sunday joint or resolving on the most tooth-some trimmings. Orderliness exists in the extreme, and a police charge in Portobello Road on a Saturday night is of the rarest occurrence.” In 1909 Portobello Market was still chiefly in the hands of the old breed of costermongers, and ” the utmost good-fellow-ship ” existed between the shopkeepers and them-selves. (Unfortunately the same cannot be said to-day, when the street traders are largely recruited from the neighbouring community of Jews, and the market is held on every day in the week.)

The houses on the west side of this part of Portobello Road were originally built as private dwellings ; but shops were soon placed over their front gardens. The houses opposite from the beginning were built as shops. Several old-established businesses still exist, one of the earliest being the large drapery store of Mr. William H. Gough, Nos. 146, 148 and 150, which was founded in 1859. For many years the timber-yard of Messrs. Horsman occupied the site of No. 191, and during forty years a corn and forage business, managed by Mr. John Green, stood at the corner of Elgin Crescent. Mr. Green was on the Kensington Vestry and was also known for a simplified musical notation, used for teaching hymn-singing in some of the neighbouring Ragged Schools. Another trader, Mr. F. Charlton Frye, represented North Kensington first on the London County Council, and then in Parliament. In these pages, as far as possible, the names of persons still living are avoided ; but no account of Portobello Road as a trading centre would be complete without some reference to the green-grocer• and florist’s business of Mr. Jesse Smith, which, from the humblest beginnings, has grown within a lifetime to its present large proportions. Much of the trading in this business and others takes place from the pavement outside the shops.

A Ragged Day and Evening School was started about 1870 on the site of the present Salvation Army Hall ; but this came to an end when a Board School was opened, in March 1876, on the long strip of vacant ground beside the railway embankment. Portobello Road School is only one story high. On account of the convenience of the communicating class-rooms, and also from its central position, this school has always played an important role in the civic life of North Kensington. Here also the July Exhibitions of the Notting Hill Flower Show and Home Improvement Society were held for several years.’

During the period in which Portobello Road was being developed as a centre for trade the Colville and Powis district was becoming consolidated. Among its earliest inhabitants was Mr. Walter Wren, the celebrated coach, who prepared hundreds of young men for the higher examinations, especially for the Indian Civil Service.

The coaching establishment of Messrs. Wren and Gurney, afterwards known as ” ‘Wren College,” occupied a series of houses in Powis Square. Apartments and boarding-houses for students sprang up in the vicinity. So many of these were occupied by men of Oriental birth that the neighbour-hood acquired the name of ” Little India.” Un-fortunately this new quarter rapidly declined, and many of the houses were divided into flats or ” maisonettes ” at a comparatively early date. (Later on much of this property was included in the Strutt Estate.)

In 1869 an iron building, the forerunner of Talbot Tabernacle, was put up by Gordon Furlong, Esq., close to All Saints Church, as a ” non-sectarian Church of Christ.” For two years previously Mr. Gordon Furlong, formerly a barrister, had conducted services in Victoria Hall, Archer Street. From 1876 to 1906 Mr. Frank Henry White was the beloved pastor of this church ; a man whose character is said to have been described by his names of Frank and White. It was in 1888, during his ministry, that ” the old tin Tabernacle ” was replaced by the present chapel with its fine Romanesque façade in red brick.

In the remaining portion of Kensington parish, lying north of Talbot Road, the houses were built on a smaller scale, those nearest the line of the Hammersmith and City Railway being the poorest. Cornwall Road, within the northern edge of the Hippodrome Estate, was extended westward to join the course of the old ” Green Lane,” thus forming a connection with Paddington. This road, originally known as Westbourne Park Road West, may some day become part of the course of the ‘Western Arterial Avenue. Probably Dr. Walker sold the northern part of his fifty-one acres to the railway company. By 1865, the land north of Cornwall Road was ” being worked by builders ” all the way from Portobello Lane to the Great Western Road. Here the south to north boundary line between the parishes runs along St. Luke’s Road and crosses the railway at Acklam Footbridge. This bridge was opened about 1870. The streets bordering St. Luke’s Road were originally occupied by quite a good class of residents, including many literary, professional and military men, with their families and their servants. The children in these families usually attended one of the excellent private middle-class schools which then abounded in Bayswater. One such ” Academy for Young Gentlemen ” was started, about 1869, by Mr. Frederick Hopkins in St. Mary’s Road, and a high-class ” Boarding School for Young Ladies ” was kept by the Misses Johnson at No. 12, The Terrace, Tavistock Road (see note 5). The only other early building in this area which need be mentioned is the large Congregational Chapel, placed in Lancaster Road at a time when all this part was little more than open fields. The foundation stone was laid by Samuel Morley, M.P., in July 1865. For many years this place of worship was a power for good under the able and earnest ministry of the Rev. James Stuart Russell. The building remains, at the corner of Basing Road, though it is now used for trade purposes.”

2 comments

    • sam horsman on January 27, 2020 at 11:25 am
    • Reply

    Good Even Scott,

    i have just stumbled across your blog while carrying out some further research on my family, Horsman’s. My Name is Sam Horsman from Adelaide, Australia however i am the Great Great grandson of William James Horsman who owned/leased the woodyard/builders yard with his brother Henry at 191 Portobello Road Notting Hill which you mention in your Blog. i have teamed up with a Dave Hucker where he has also written a Blog specifically on the property and its history as its now the Electric Cinema.

    see attached link if you wish to read and i hope you’re still active on the blog as it would be great to hear for you as i am intrigued by the area as my family built some significant buildings and worked on many in London.

    https://northkensingtonhistories.wordpress.com/2017/01/22/horsmans-west-london-saw-mills-and-joinery-works/

    https://www.electriccinemaclub.com/before-the-electric

    thanks

  1. Hi Sam,

    Unforgivably I missed your comment in January 2020 and have only just seen it. Oops!

    I would be very interested to hear your family’s story in W10/W11.

    Sorry again for the late reply 🙁

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