Campden Hill is a charming area, with properties in various styles and from several historical periods. This diversity results in pleasant contrast rather than jarring conflict and the area is surprisingly sedate given the torrid nature of the three roads on its borders.
Mansion blocks and modern flats sit comfortably with small-scale shops, and cosy pubs and offices sit close to a wide variety of residential properties. There are many pretty cottages here going for very un-cottagey prices and the greenery both kerbside and in the front gardens is the product of some understandably house-proud tenants.
The most ubiquitous properties here are the 18th and 19th century stucco and brick gable houses but the area has also found space for new developments, some in the disused buildings of the College and some over the old reservoir. A few of the latter will even be at affordable prices.
South of Campden is the Philimore Estate, a more homogenously Victorian neighbourhood. Stucco and brick again rule the roost but later additions provide apartment dwellings from the 1910s and the 1960s.
East of Kensington Church Street is dominated by the palace and the long spine of Kensington Palace Gardens/Palace Green. Tenants here enjoy a fallout from the security supplied by the diplomatic services to the embassies that predominate here.
Edwardian and inter-war flats break up the domination of the mansions, more stucco but with plenty of leafy surrounds and not a few colonnaded entrances. Is there a pricier part of London? A three-bed flat will knock you back a cool £2m.
Crossing southward over High Street Ken we enter another surprisingly quiet and green enclave with the busy and shop-laden Gloucester Road to the east and traffic-mad Cromwell Road to the south. Cream and white stucco are the order of the day and some of W8's oldest survivals are here in the form of apartments built for palace courtiers in Kensington Square and Derry and Young Streets.
Gardens and multi-occupancy make their presence felt round here and house-front columns and black canopies are an attractive feature of this area. Redbrick mansion blocks slot themselves amongst the Victorian villas but for apartment dwelling nowhere is more dominant than the converted Air Terminal offices on Cromwell Road, now housing 350 flats and a health club. At the other end of this district the late-lamented Kensington Market awaits its transformation into flats and houses.
Moving west from here, immediately south of Church Street, can be found the greatest transformation in recent W8 history. The old hospital off Marloes Road is now Kensington Green, all flats and houses completed in 1991 while eight years later Wrights Lane opened up with 119 flats and a fitness centre.
Otherwise the tenor of this place is hotels and flats, some converted and some mansion blocks. Mews and terraced cul-de-sacs complete a pleasing picture and many small shops and restaurants are juxtaposed with that rare beast - the stucco-faced apartment block.
The south-west corner of W8 has a dense grid of roads seemingly all named either Edwardes or Pembroke. Georgian Squares and Mews and Victorian Terraces predominate with many shops close by at Earls Court. As green as anywhere in Kensington this area also has some of the more striking street furniture to be found in any postcode. A few inter-war houses and vast mansion blocks complete the scene and the new Kensington Westside development will furnish the capital with another 294 flats upon completion, 59 of them deemed affordable.
FeaturesThe front terrace of the ruined house has an annual opera season from June to August and the small 18th century Ice House is now an exhibition gallery. The Orangery, the House's original conservatory, now presents the finest in contemporary arts and an Ecology Centre displays information about the park and other parts of the Royal Borough. The house's surviving wing contains a youth hostel.
Sports fans are accommodated with cricket, football, tennis, netball and golf. There is an under-8s area and a rebuilt adventure playground. Even for all these facilities there are gardens both formal and informal which allow a serenity quite at odds with frenetic High Street Ken near the park's southern boundary.
Also at the southern corner of the park is the Commonwealth Institute. Replacing the 1887 Imperial Institute, this 1962 building promotes the multifarious activities of the Commonwealth via an ever-changing array of exhibitions and films in its 430-seat cinema. The institute's catholic approach covers education, business conferences, lectures and teaching resources. The latest addition is a heliride simulator.
W8's second great open space is Kensington Palace Gardens, effectively now the western border of Hyde Park but still displaying the care lavished on them by four reigns: William & Mary, Anne, and Georges I & II. Anne and George II both died here in undignified circumstances but not before leaving their mark on the gardens; the former by its conversion to the English model and away from the formal Dutch box designs of her predecessors. The latter gave the park its Broad Walk and Round Pond.
The Hanoverian Succession in 1714 brought a German invasion of the palace and the flamboyant staircases and trompes l'oeil date from this time. They remain popular features for visitors who can see the State Apartments and the Court Dress Collection between May and October. One can only surmise what George II would have thought of the conversion of his Broad Walk, once the place to be seen in the capital, into a rollerblading track.
There is a third great set of gardens in W8 but they are suspended a hundred feet above the pedestrian's head. Set on top of the Art Deco monoliths of Barkers and Derry & Toms' stores these roof gardens were laid out in 1936-8 by landscape architect Ralph Hancock. Still open to the public all year round, the three original themes (Spanish Garden, Tudor Garden and English Woodland Garden) remain dominant, covering 1½ acres and home to flamingoes and ducks.
The average depth of the soil here is 18" and a Tree Preservation Order was slapped on the building in 1976. There is a nightclub on the roof as well and the whole place is open to hire for functions, conferences or weddings.
If you don't live in W8 the chances are that what will bring you and your credit card here is the shopping. Kensington High Street - High Street Ken to the initiated - has been called "Oxford Street without the crowds" but this does not do it justice. While all the usual suspects are present - H&M, Benetton, M&S - there are more exclusive outlets with the likes of Hype DF, Karen Millen, The Source, Snow & Rock, The Conran Shop, Hyper-Hyper and the Racquet Shop. More of a cross between Oxford Street and the Kings Road.
Although the original owners are long gone, the colossal Art Deco edifices of Barkers and Derry & Toms still tower over every other creation in Kensington. The former now hosts Benetton and Jigsaw and the latter contains BHS, a successor on this site to the Biba department store in the mid-70s. Their bronze and glass towers and stone reliefs of aeroplanes and cars project the era's unbending faith in progress.
Running north off High Street Ken is Kensington Church Street. This is Antiques Central, not a place to hunt for bargains for this is the real collectors' paradise. Some ninety outlets deal in every antique niche there is, from Tang Dynasty pottery to militaria, from Queen Anne glassware to Continental porcelain, from solid silver furniture to all aspects of horology. Worth a look but leave your credit rating in another postcode if you are anything less than serious.
W8 also has a reputation for education. There are several private schools in the district while Kensington & Chelsea College has five campuses spread throughout the borough. Holland Park School converts into a college in the evenings where its speciality is foreign languages. Cromwell Hospital on the southern edge of W8 must be the nation's most famous private medical facility.
TransportHigh Street Kensington station takes the Circle and District Lines northward while Notting Hill Gate station to the north bisects these two with the Central Line. Kensington Olympia is a short hop to the west of W8 and serves a train line running from Rugby in the north to Brighton in the south, taking in Gatwick Airport, Clapham Junction and Milton Keynes.
There are always plenty of buses running along High Street Ken and Notting Hill Gate and a few are brave enough to hack their way along Kensington Church Street.
Steve Roberts
HistoryThe hamlet of Kensington grew slowly around the ancient parish church of St. Mary Abbott at the modern-day junction of the High Street and Church Street. From the Tudor period onward Kensington gained a reputation for market gardening, supplying the burgeoning capital well into Victorian times, but history had a far more glittering destiny in mind for W8.
It was James VI & I's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Robert Cope, who set the ball rolling. Espying an area that afforded both retreat and close proximity to the capital he set out his stall to build Cope Castle in 1606. When his son-in-law inherited the mansion he renamed it after himself and Holland House became one of London's most famous halls.
As a centre for networking and gossip nowhere had more intrigue - hosting the innermost machinations of the Whig Party brought talent in its train in the form of Dickens, Wordsworth, Thackeray, Sheridan, Talleyrand, Palmerston, Macaulay and a raft of politicos and other literati.
Campden House followed Cope Castle in 1612 and Kensington began its unassailable rise to the social elite. This was sealed when the new Protestant monarch William III, suffering from asthma in riverside Whitehall Palace, spotted Nottingham House in 1689 and began its transformation into Kensington Palace.
Queen Mary, tired at Whitehall of being able to "see nothing but water or wall" was equally enthusiastic and hurried the conversion works at Kensington to the point of collapse and the deaths of several workers. But upon completion the palace became the chief address for four monarchs, each inflicting their own landscape designs on the grounds until George II died in 1760. The palace has remained an important overflow house for royals ever since and Queen Victoria was born here in 1819.
Market gardens were now quickly wound up as ground rents became proven moneyspinners. From 8,500 souls in 1801 Kensington exploded to 176,000 people in 1871 and private schools, still a feature of the area, began to appear. Exclusive housing estates sprung up all over the area and outstanding examples of these include the Philimore, Kensington New Town, Norland and Kensington Square Estates.
Kensington now embarked on its other claim to fame: shopping. High Street Ken became the centre for trade as John Barker, Charles Derry and Charles Toms all opened shops in the 1860s that would come to dominate as art deco department stores between the wars. The Ponting Brothers brought their Westbourne Grove business to do battle with Barkers and Derry & Toms in the 1890s and the High Street remains an international outpost for clothes shopping. Church Street, in its turn, has become a global leader in antiques.
Steve Roberts.
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