Knightsbridge and South Kensington maintain their dwelling places in a quietitude poles apart from the hectic vehicular action of the main through routes, but it is the vastness of the Albert Hall, the Colleges of Art and Music, Imperial College, Brompton Oratory and the four great museums which set the tone for the area and overcome all other influences - even the shopping fever of Brompton Road.
HousingTo the east long cobbled mews live happily in conjunction with stone and stucco columnated terraces. Most of the latter have long since been split into flats and have become beneficiaries of leasehold reform, ensuring shares of freehold become a distinct possibility. Garden squares abound here, perennially popular with their private residents' greens, and more recent developments here include the inter-war flats of Kingston House and the Eighties' townhouses of Bolney Gate.
A pleasing feature of this part of the world is the obvious care taken by the residents in their varied mews' cottages and brick/stucco houses with flower tubs, window boxes and impeccably-kept street furniture.
Squares predominate as we move into the old centre of Knightsbridge with the village green now marooned in a sea of through-routes the size of a motorway. Montpelier and Trevor Squares are the twin centrepieces. Victorian brick and painted stucco loom over all, again with a marked lack of the mansion blocks that dominate so much else of west central London. Terraced cottages face onto Trevor Square and again the gardens are reserved for tenants.
Knightsbridge Green, where Brompton Road meets Knightsbridge around multi-laned roads, is being transformed in a 4½-acre development of shops, offices and 50 flats. The adjoining 1.7-acre site, facing the park, is set to host 200 homes.
West of the museums and colleges is dominated by the axis of Queen's Gate, with tall mid-Victorian stucco the order of the day. Multi-occupancy came here long before Knightsbridge proper succumbed but the same pattern of infilling mews' cottages remains the norm. Stone arches cover the entrance to these one-time servants' quarters, and again residents' care and attention is evident in floral abundance. More complete houses are likely to survive as we close in on Hyde Park with the exception of more modern flats on Kensington Road itself.
The French air south of the museums and Cromwell Road in South Kensington is a legacy of the French University College, and almost all the stucco properties that prevail here have been split into flats with varying results. The large Stanhope Gardens with its attendant parallel mews has seen many small-scale developments over the years, none bigger than the recent conversion of the west side of the square into 83 fIats behind the original façade.
Short leases remain common as we head south over the Old Brompton Road and into the heart of South Kensington. Since 1995 the bulk of the land here has been owned by the Wellcome Trust and they keep a rigid code of how houses should look. Squares and mews maintain the air of the rest of SW7, columns, black iron railings and stucco still much in evidence.
The difference with the northern half of the postcode is antiquity, with Georgian and Regency edifices making more of an appearance. Similarly, though, this sea of stucco has seen great conversions through time into apartment living, although costly exceptions can again found in the area's mews' cottages.
At the very southern edge of SW7, in the shadow of Fulham Road, the Victorian mansion block finally rears its head. Next door, part of Brompton Hospital has become 73 flats and stucco maisonettes are also in evidence.
South Kensington can boast an equally proud populace with their flower tubs and window displays fronting mews' premises and 27 new houses appeared in the Eighties in Eagle Place and Roland Way, each with appropriate security barriers at either end of the street. We also start to see some of the Dutch-style South Kensington look with terracotta ornamentation and rich brick gables as we home in on SW5 and SW1O.
FacilitiesThe Albert Hall must be one of the world's most recognisable concert venues. Assured a place in the cultural pantheon for hosting over seventy promenade concerts each year (since the destruction of the Queens Hall in 1941) it had a difficult genesis, with an eighteen-year lapse between the first plan and actual construction. To everyone's horror the acoustics on the first night showed the hall to be unsuitable for music, and the infamous echo led to the old joke that the Albert Hall was the only venue where a British composer could be assured of hearing his work performed twice.
Not until 1968 were giant saucers placed in the ceiling to improve the sound. Restoration works have been ongoing since 1993 to bring the hall back up to scratch (not least the 150-ton organ, performed on by Anton Bruckner on the first night) and while music of all descriptions remains its bread and butter the hall is not averse to diversifying. The 2002/3 winter season will see visits from Whirling Dervishes, Ballroom Championships, National TV Awards, Ballet and a Tennis Tournament. It can seat up to 5,266 people.
To the west and south of the hall lie some of Britain's most venerable educational establishments. The Imperial College of Science, Technolgy and Medicine is "one of the world's most prestigious institutions of advanced technological education" and it covers the scientific world from bioinformatics to chronobiology.
Next door is the equally large Royal College of Music, home to a sonorous world of students, archival material, libraries, donated historical items and visiting masters. Its 1986 Britten Theatre also now helps to host the new International Opera School. Split between two sites here is the Royal College of Art, dealing in the likes of applied art, fashion and textiles, design, fine art and architecture.
The Royal College of Art and the Albert Hall lie on Kensington Gore, the term coming from the Anglo-Saxon "gara", a piece of land left over after ploughing irregularly-shaped fields. The third great edifice on the Gore is the Royal Geographic Society, holders of the greatest collection of maps in the world (the map room is open to the public) and still performing their original function of "the improvement and diffusion of geographical knowledge".
As Culture Secretary Chris Smith admitted that it was a personal crusade to bring free access back to the museums of SW7. Achieved in 2001, the upswing in visitor numbers showed the original folly of priced admission to what are some of the world's great archives.
Heading south from the colleges our first museum is the Science Museum, where "our collections form an enduring record of scientific, technological and medical change since the eighteenth century". Famously popular with children it regularly increases its hands-on exhibits with an ever-growing range of drama shows and MAX films, while titles like 3D Mania, Beautiful Bugs and It's Electric are guaranteed to draw a crowd.
To the south of that is the Natural History Museum, "a centre of scientific excellence in taxonomy and biodiversity", dedicated to the enjoyment and understanding of the natural world. Looming over Cromwell Road in Alfred Waterhouse's fantastic Victorian terracotta creation it displays its wares in a deliberate imitation of a Rhineland cathedral. Half of the building's worth lies in its research institution, second to none in its speciality fields of palaeontology, zoology, entomolgy, botany and mineralogy.
Heading east would have brought you to the Geological Museum, home to over a million specimens of fossils and minerals. This has now been rededicated as the Earth Gallery of the Natural History Museum. Instead we encounter the Victoria & Albert Museum, "the greatest museum of applied and decorative arts in the world" and home to a global take on fashion, textiles, sculpture, ceramics, glass, metalwork, silver, jewellery, furniture, photography and painting.
Down the years the V&A has become something of a dumping ground for whatever seems unsuitable elsewhere. One time director Roy Strong complained that "any visitor to the V&A is likely to be bemused as to what exactly is the central thread that animates these discrepant if marvellous collections. The answer is that there is none. For over a century the Museum has provided an extremely capacious handbag". To the south of the museums is the tiny Chanticleer Theatre, home to the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Arts.
SW7 also provides some sumptuous religious marvels. The Catholic magnificence of Brompton Oratory (1884) was used by the KGB as a dead letter box during the Cold War. An 1849 church was converted to the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in 1956 and in 1985 the Ismaili Centre, home to the Aga Khan's branch of Shi'ite Muslims, appeared opposite the V&A. Its architectural splendour is topped off by a rooftop courtyard garden.
On a far more material plane is SW7's reputation as a retailing nirvana. The great auction houses of Bonhams and Christies are here while restaurants in the form of Italian, Indian, seafood, Thai, American, French, Mediterranean, Polish, Persian, Mongolian and Moroccan can be sampled in the district.
Harrods and Harvey Nichols must be the most famous stores here; head for food at the former and fashion at the latter, but be careful of a dress code at Mohammed Al-Fayed's palace. We are in the "Tiara Triangle", a sector of wildly expensive fashion emporia formed by the triangle of Knightsbridge, Sloane Street and Beauchamp Place.
In spite of all this stiff competition Hyde Park/Kensington Gardens must remain SW7's greatest asset, central London's great 615-acre lung. Owned at one time by the monks of Westminster, it was taken by Henry VIII as a hunting ground at the Reformation. His daugter Elizabeth began early its tradition of public spectacles and exhibitions and it can now boast four miles of horse rides as well as cycle and roller-blading routes.
"There are also areas planted and managed as meadowland to encourage a wide range of insect life and the ecological chains they support. There is an education centre used by schools from all over London" while to be in the park is to see that rarity in central London, a horizon. Hyde Park feels a lot larger in situ that it appears on the A-Z.
Opposite Knightsbridge it features the Hyde Park Barracks, home to the monarch's Household Cavalry, and the Albert Memorial, now restored to its original gaudy splendour. A brilliant gold Prince Albert did not amuse his widow, who encouraged its gradual conversion to black. So complete was the process that the original shade of gold was thought to be lost until a solitary flake was discovered under the Prince's left foot.
TransportFurther south more main drags in the form of Cromwell Road, Gloucester Road and Old Brompton Road join the party and the alleviating qualities of Carriage Drive, allowed to split Hyde Park in half, comes as a great relief to the area. Buses fight their way along these main roads along with the rest of the vehicular world.
Tube connection here are good, with Knightsbridge providing access to the Piccadilly Line along with Gloucester Road and South Kensington which also in turn accommodate the Circle and District Lines.
Steve Roberts
HistoryIf the old tale is true then it is an apposite one. The area's unsavoury and sinister past is tied up with the slow development of Hyde Park and the village of Knightsbridge provided many of London's more infamous taverns and inns as an appropriate backdrop for its shady pastimes. Its dangerous air would bring men of renown seeking a seedy thrill and Samuel Pepys would hold forth at the World's End, Thomas Otway at the Swan and Joshua Reynolds at the Fox and Bull.
But this was not a place for the faint-hearted. The twin terrors of highwaymen and duels dominated the ground around here. A notorious case involved a woman who swallowed her wedding ring to keep it from footpads, one of whom killed her and was duly sent to the gallows in 1687. In 1749 Horace Walpole records taking an unwise short cut home from Holland House and getting back one watch and eight guineas lighter.
Consequently it was here that Britain's first road to be lit at night first appeared. This was William Ill's Road of the King, or Route De Roi. The London mob was having no truck with the name and coined the corruption of Rotten Row, which survives today. 300 lamps were hung from trees to deter robbers but the scheme was not a great success.
Other gunshots to make themselves heard here came in duelling. The 18th century was the apogee of this form of settling honour and no case was more tragic than the 1712 duel between Lord Mohun and the Duke of Hamilton. The enmity between the two men was so great that they disregarded the ettiquette of duelling and rushed upon one another; the ensuing violence killed Mohun immediately and Hamilton within minutes.
Thirty years after having his pockets relieved of their contents Walpole witnessed a duel between Charles James Fox and William Adam. Fox declined to turn side on to his opponent with the irrefutable logic that he was "as thick one way as another" and a slight wound to his frame was the outcome. Walpole recorded it as the "most perfect of all duels. So much good temper, good sense, propriety, easy good humour and natural good nature".
Hyde Park became the site for a spectacular fair to celebrate the end of the Napoleonic Wars. French "ships" were set alight and every blade of grass in the park was consumed in the blaze. Charles Lamb told William Wordsworth that "the stench of liqours, bad tobacco, dirty people and provisions conquers the air and we are stifled and suffocated in Hyde Park".
Knightsbridge's second life was about to begin. The progenitor for this was Henry Cole, assistant keeper at the Public Records Office and the man who had the brainwave of a Great Exhibition. Several worthies were co-opted onto a committee, headed by Prince Albert, to raise funds. Potential sites included the Isle of Dogs, Primrose Hill, Regents Park and Battersea, but to the horror of the Times Hyde Park was chosen.
The paper commented that the park would become "a bivouac of all vagabonds. Kensington and Belgravia would be uninhabitable and the Season would be ruined". Joseph Paxton's design for a transparent hall was accepted and its size was so great that trees in the park were incorporated into the building. To cut down on droppings sparrowhawks were introduced.
The great success of the Exhibition lasted from opening day on 1 May 1851 to its close on 15 October. An 84-year old Cornishwoman walked there from her native county. A Chinese mandarin sailed halfway around the world in his private junk to be there. The building was carefully dismantled to reappear as the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, while the gate receipts of £365,000 would go to purchase eighty acres of farmland to the south of the park to create an oasis of learning and culture.
The idea of "Albertopolis" or "Coleville" now came into being. Heavyweight culture would appear here in the thirty years after the Exhibition in the form of the Albert Hall, the Victoria & Albert Museum, The Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, Imperial College, the Royal College of Art, the Royal College of Music and, in time, the Geological Museum. They are all still here. An early attempt at the Albert Memorial was scorned by the Prince himself:
"I can say, with perfect absence of humbug, that I would much rather not be made the prominent feature of such a monument, as it would both disturb my quiet rides in Rotten Row to see my own face staring at me, and if (as is very likely) it became an artistic monstrosity, like most of our monuments, it would upset my equanimity to be permanently ridiculed and laughed at in effigy".
The area made more international headlines in recent times with the Iranian Embassy Siege in 1980 and the IRA's attack on the Blues & Royals near the park barracks two years later.
Steve Roberts.
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