As we move west, between Draycott Avenue and Sydney Street, the roads become more regular and based on a north-south axis between Fulham Road and Kings Road. Cottages give way to fin-de-siècle mansion blocks as the dominant theme. On Lucan Place is a 1989 development of 154 flats.
The rented flats of the Sutton Estate are to be found here but they do not intrude on the serene atmosphere provided by Chelsea Green, with its eclectic mix of retailers and some accompanying inter-war brick houses. Running between the Green and Kings Road are pictureque pastel cottages going for around a million apiece.
Crossing west over Sydney Street we enter a world dominated by squares and hospitals. Chelsea Square (confusingly called Trafalgar Square up to 1923) is as popular a residential address as it gets in SW3. Its inter-war brick creations give way to the equally popular early Victorian cream stucco of Carlyle Square. The little streets that otherwise predominate here run the gamut from mock-Tudor to apartment conversions to Edwardian artists' studio houses.
To the south-east, between Kings Road and the Embankment, is an area much in demand for its views, be they of the Royal Hospital grounds or the Thames. Some of the oldest and most expensive Chelsea properties are here, laid out in long terraces and resplendent with front gardens. Properties here can be a mix, with artists' studios juxtaposed with inter-war mock Tudor and mansion flats. Stucco again dominates in Tedworth and Wellington Squares and part of the Duke of York's HQ is becoming a mixed-use development of shops and flats.
To the west, in the ever-narrowing corner between Kings Road and the Embankment, is the oldest part of Chelsea. Beaufort Street takes you on to Battersea Bridge and moving east from its mansion blocks there are some highly desirable residences in the early-Victorian Paultons Square or the Georgiana of Cheyne Walk. The ancient heart of Chelsea is Old Church Street, and this is suitably mixed-up in its commercial and residential styles. A builders' yard here was converted in 1997 into nineteen flats and four houses.
Behind Cheyne Walk is a pleasing jumble of quiet terraced cottages interspersed with artists' studios and the occasional mansion block. The Albert Bridge approach road is Oakley Street, hosting on its west side the mansion blocks that culminate in the great Pier House of the Seventies. Its east side and the streets immediately to its east are dominated by 3-storey brick and stucco terraces.
From here and back to the Hospital grounds the scene shifts back to cottages, some with front gardens and some with colourful facades. Around the Physic Gardens we find detached Georgian mansions, mews cottages and studio houses.
FacilitiesThe Chelsea Pensioners' Royal Hospital is world-famous and is open to the public (with orders to behave in a suitable manner). But to the north-west of this is a collection of hospitals and clinics. There is the Florence Nightingale Hospital and the better-known Brompton Heart & Lung Hospital with its out-clinic on Dovehouse Street. There are children's facilities at the clinics of Cheyne Centre and the Violet Melchett Clinic. The Charter Clinic specialises in orthopaedics and psychiatry.
Central to all is the Marsden Hospital. Created in 1851 by William Marsden who said he wanted "to found a hospital for the treatment of cancer, and for the study of the disease, for at the present time we know absolutely nothing about it", it remains the world's foremost cancer-fighting institution.
Shopaholics flock to SW3 for the famous Kings Road, adept at endlessly reinventing itself for the fads of each generation. The local department store is still here; a young Welsh grocer called Peter Jones set up shop here in 1877 and it was such a success he floated it on the stock exchange in 1900. The many eateries of SW3 are concentrated here, and gastronomes are in for a fine time with a wide selection.
Choice encompasses Tex-Mex, British, Russian, French, seafood, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Thai, Chinese, Indian and Lebanese. Like High Street Kensington this is a terrifically busy road which is contrasted with a high degree of serenity in the side streets. There is a Farmers' Market on Sydney Street and Antiquarius, an antiques market, at the corner of Kings Road and Flood Street.
SW3 is a great place for festivals. Top dog, of course, must be the Chelsea Flower Show, begun in 1913 and held in the grounds of the Royal Hospital. For one week in May the prime names in world horticulture descend to battle it out in garden designs and floral pavilions while the industry shows off its latest technological gadgetry to aid the weary tiller of the soil.
Keeping with nature there is the Chelsea Physic Garden, repository of an international seed exchange scheme for three centuries. With 5,000 species the garden concentrates its focus on medicinal and ethnobotanical specimens. The Pharmaceutical Garden and the Garden of World Medicine in particular work toward plants that can be beneficial to mankind. For non-members the Physic Garden is open in spring and summer.
Other festivals include the Chelsea Festival and the Crafts Fair, both annual. The former is especially universal, taking in classical and jazz music, a fashion extravaganza, tours of interesting Chelsea buildings and dramatic works. The Crafts Fair is billed as "Europe's leading fair for design-led contemporary crafts and applied arts". It is held at the Town Hall, which also accommodates the local library and sports centre.
Festivals also take place at the Duke of York's Headquarters by the Royal Hospital. Although normally the HQ for the likes of the Westminster Dragoons and the London Irish Rifles, it puts on shows such as artLondon for art dealers and a Veteran Car Rally. Regimental dinners are its normal bill of fare. In the war it held treachery trials, including that of Josef Jakobs, German spy and the last man to be executed at the Tower of London (1941).
Also close by the Royal Hospital is the National Army Museum. "It is the only museum to tell the story of the Army as a whole from Agincourt in the Fifteenth Century to peace-keeping in the Twenty-first Century" and deals with exhibitions and school education as some of its extracurricular activities. One of the five campuses of Kensington & Chelsea College is in SW3; this is the Marlborough Centre on Sloane Avenue, and it has an outpost at the Jenningsbury Centre on the William Sutton Estate.
For those wanting wide open spaces a trip over the bridges to Battersea Park or north to Hyde Park is a necessary trek.
TransportConsolation comes in the form of Victoria, a twin monolith of trains and coaches a little to the east. This can conduct you to all points of the compass, with many Continental destinations thrown in. And there is always the old canard of "Chelney". This is the much talked of, never seen, Chelsea to Hackney Tube Line. On the cards since the Seventies it has had to take a back seat first to the Jubilee Line (1974) and CrossRail (1989 to the present). Whether it regains its pole position is still in the balance.
Steve Roberts
HistoryThis Middlesex village, as recorded in Domesday, went its own sweet way in the world rearing its head in the historical records only in passing mention of its occasional aristocratic resident. This all changed in 1520, when Thomas More, high-flying lawyer and recently engaged by Henry VIII, needed a new and sumptuous place to live appropriate to his new position.
Chelsea quickly became the "village of palaces" as older ennobled families moved in, and the area's new reputation survived More's fall from grace in 1535. Henry himself built a manor house here which was to remain a royal favourite up to the Republic. The district was perfect, close to the centres of power but isolated from the frenzy of town by the swamps of the Five Fields - modern-day Belgravia.
By two acts of grandiloquence, one selfish and one altruistic, Charles II perhaps more than any other set the seal on Chelsea's ascendancy. The first was to enclose and make private an old farm track as the straightest route from Whitehall to Hampton Court Palace. Only bearers of a solid copper pass bearing the imprint of the monarch of the day could use what naturally became known as the King's Road. Not until 1830 were mere mortals allowed to travel on the highway.
More selfless was a proposal by Paymaster-General Stephen Fox, who upon noting hospitals for invalided soldiers in France and Ireland put to Charles a plan for a British equivalent. The buildings of a dilapidated theological college were levelled and Christopher Wren appointed to design the new Chelsea Hospital, opened to 476 old soldiers in 1692. Their 18th century style of dress remains.
At much the same time, and a little to the west, the Physic Garden was created by the Society of Apothecaries to train their members in plant identification. Its place by the river granted it a microclimate warmer than enjoyed in most of Britain and via its seed exchange programme there came from this little patch of land two of the world's great industries - tea in India and cotton in the USA.
It was now that Chelsea began its time in the artistic demi-monde. Johnathan Swift, walking by the river in Chelsea in 1711, cast a jaundiced eye over proceedings: "there is a mighty increase in dirty wenches in straw hats since I was last in London". The opening of Ranelagh Gardens as a pleasure garden in 1742 consolidated Chelsea's rakish reputation.
Based aroung a rotunda 120' in diameter - once performed in by Wolfgang Mozart - the gardens proved a roaring success and drew writers from all around to marvel at the sights and, especially, the people. Edward Gibbon, somewhat euphemistically, called it "the most convenient place for courtships of every kind - the best market we have in England".
With the opening of the old wooden Battersea Bridge in 1772 (so lovingly portrayed on various occasions by Whistler) Chelsea was prised open to the world. Chelsea's other bridges would follow in 1858 (Chelsea) and 1873 (Albert) and the Embankment would be created in 1874.
In the nineteenth century it retained its huge popularity with artists and writers - the Victorian roll call of literary and artistic giants who resided here is second to none in London. Elisabeth Gaskell was born here and George Eliot died here. Thomas and Jane Carlyle held court to a spellbound audience that included Dickens, Tennyson, Mazzini, Chopin, the Brownings and Darwin.
Swinburne spent his days here in a blaze of alcohol with his friend George Meredith and Rossetti upset the neighbourhood with his back garden zoo (as a result peacocks are, to this day, banned in Chelsea). Tite Street catered for the artists, with Sargent, Augustus John and Whistler all residents; it was also the thoroughfare on which Oscar Wilde first met with Lord Alfred Douglas.
Chelsea kept its boho beat until recent times. For hippies and punks it became a mecca - devotees of both counter-cultures flocked to the Kings Road to buy clothes at Nigel Weymouth's Granny Takes A Trip and Vivienne Westwood's Sex. Mick Jagger, like Keith Richards a resident of Cheyne Walk, sang of going "down to the Chelsea drugstore to get your prescription filled". But money speaks louder than art, and the artists have gone, replaced by the few who can afford to live here.
More serious activities in Chelsea included widespread bomb damage in 1941 (Chelsea's population fell from 58,000 to 16,000 during the war) and the attentions of the IRA in 1981. It was at Cheyne Walk in 1972 that the first face-to-face talks between the Provisional IRA and the British Government took place.
Martin McGuinness recalled years later: "I was 22 years of age, and I couldn't be anything but impressed by the paraphernalia surrounding that whole business...I was on the run at the time...we were met by a fleet of limousines. They were the fanciest cars I had ever seen in my life: it was a most unreal experience".
Steve Roberts.
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