Local History

Both Kensington and Chelsea originated as Saxon settlements. The origins of the name Chelsea are uncertain. One theory is that the name comes from an old Anglo-Saxon word for gravel bank and as Chelsea lies on gravel this does seem plausible. Kensington is generally thought to be derived from ‘Chenesi’s tun’, ‘tun’ being an Anglo-Saxon word for homestead or village.

Chelsea is the first to appear in historical documents, earning a mention in an eighth century charter. But Kensington and Chelsea both show up in the Domesday Book (1086). Kensington is described as one of the manors granted to an Aubrey de Vere, while Chelsea was owned by one Edward of Salisbury.

In subsequent centuries, the Manor of Chelsea passed through various hands but the de Vere family remained Lords of the Manor of Kensington until the 16th century. The elevation of the De Veres to the Earldom of Oxford in 1155 led people to begin referring to the Manor’s court house as the Earl’s Court. The court house stood in the heart of the area which now carries its name. Earl’s Court is perhaps best known today for its international exhibition and event centre. The art deco exhibition centre opened in 1937. It stands on the site of the Earl’s Court Exhibition Ground, which from 1887 until the Great War, hosted a string of spectacular events including Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show.

One of Kensington’s earliest inhabitants of note was Sir Walter Cope, a favourite of James I. In 1604 Sir Walter began work on his great mansion, Cope’s Castle. Renamed Holland House in 1661, the house became a glittering literary and political salon. The house and gardens today form one of London’s most beautiful public spaces, Holland Park.Royalty took up residence in Kensington in 1689 when William III moved into Kensington Palace. The presence of the royal court was a sharp spur to development. Beautiful Kensington Square, which dates from this time, was a failing venture until the arrival of courtiers looking for homes to rent close to the Palace. By 1704 a John Bowack was able to write that Kensington was ‘inhabited by Gentry and Persons of Note: There is also an abundance of Shopkeepers and all sorts of Artificers in it, which makes it appear rather like part of London, than a Country Village’.

Although no reigning monarch was resident after 1760, Kensington Palace continued to influence the parish. On 24 May, 1819 the future Queen Victoria was born there, residing at the Palace until her accession to the throne in 1837. In 1901, in accordance with the late Queen’s wishes that her place of birth should have a distinction, King Edward VII conferred on Kensington the title ‘Royal Borough’. This honour was extended to Chelsea when the two boroughs were united in 1965 to form the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

Chelsea had its own links with royalty. Henry VIII acquired the manor of Chelsea in 1536 and the future Queen Elizabeth I was a resident there for a time. James I founded a theological college on a site later to be occupied by The Royal Hospital. Founded by Charles II for the care of permanently disabled soldiers, the Hospital is still there today and its uniformed residents have become known worldwide as the Chelsea Pensioners.
Chelsea was the busier of the two parishes, its location on the River Thames making it easily accessible from London. Many notables built or rented houses in Chelsea, including the Lord Chancellor and Catholic martyr Sir Thomas More, who built a house there in about 1520 and conducted some of the nation’s affairs from it. More also once briefly owned Crosby Hall, a magnificent banqueting hall in Bishopsgate which was moved ‘brick by brick’, to Chelsea in 1908.

An account of Chelsea, by Dr. John King, Rector of Chelsea, written in 1694 noted that ‘the number of houses are mightily increased of late years; for there are 350 houses in the Parish’. Despite this growth, neither Kensington nor Chelsea was particularly large, with probably not more than 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants in each. Both villages were predominantly rural, providing Londoners with days out: Samuel Pepys mentions trips to both Kensington and Chelsea in his diaries.

During the seventeenth century, gardeners from Chelsea, Kensington and Fulham supplied London with much of its fruit and vegetables. This trade with the big city did not die out until the 19th century, when the two parishes were completely absorbed by London during the enormous building boom of the Victorian era.

In 1712, society physician, Sir Hans Sloane bought the Manor of Chelsea from William, Lord Cheyne. Sloane’s fantastic collection of botanical, geological, numismatic, antiquarian, medical and literary specimens helped form the nucleus of the British Museum collections. Sloane also assured the future of Chelsea Physic Garden, which is still open to the public today. The garden – dedicated to botany and its application – is on land leased to the Apothecaries’ Company in 1673 by the Cheynes. In 1722, Sloane made over the land to the Company in perpetuity, on payment of an annual rent of £5.

Chelsea’s Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens opened in 1742. With its astonishing Rotunda, based on the Pantheon in Rome, its balloon ascents and concerts – including one given by Mozart himself in 1764 – the gardens attracted tremendous crowds, the great and good amongst them. Horace Walpole noted that one could not set one’s foot without treading on a Prince of Wales. A number of more modest-sized tea gardens and pleasure grounds were later established, adding to Chelsea’s reputation as a pleasant place to live and visit. The tradition of Ranelagh was continued with the opening of Cremorne Gardens in 1846 but Cremorne never achieved the popularity of Ranelagh and was closed in 1877; the site is now covered by the Lots Road area.

Though not as well off for public gardens as Chelsea, Kensington could boast of having the gardens of The Royal Horticultural Society, first on a small plot to the west of Edwardes Square between 1819 to 1824, and then between 1858 and 1885 on land to the north of the site of the Natural History Museum.Kensington and Chelsea were increasingly considered to be healthy areas, free of London’s miasmas. With so many large houses available, they became natural locations for private schools, a tradition that is still strong today. For similar reasons, asylums also favoured the area. However, horticulture and agriculture remained the principal industries of both parishes, although some sand and gravel were extracted, particularly in the Notting Hill Gate area.

The first census in 1801 describes Kensington as an area of 2,300 acres with a population of 8,500 and Chelsea as an area of 660 acres with a population of 11,600. The 1831 census shows Chelsea maintaining its population lead over significantly larger Kensington – 32,371 against 20,902. Not until 1861 were the positions reversed with Kensington showing an amazing increase in population between 1851 and 1871 from 44,053 to 120,299.

The late 18th and 19th centuries were a time of expansion for both parishes. As London grew, there was an increasing demand for building land. Knightsbridge was among the first to be affected. In 1777 Henry Holland, architect to the Georgian aristocracy, began the Hans Town development on open field and marsh leased from the Cadogan family. Sloane Street, Sloane Square and Hans Place, Hans Street and Hans Crescent were built and quickly acquired the cachet that they still enjoy today.

The Hans Town development was unusual in Chelsea. Small speculative building projects, such as Green’s Row (1765) and Durham Place (1790) were more typical of the way in which the parish developed. In 1748 a foreign visitor wrote that ‘On all sides round about Chelsea there is scarcely seen anything else than either orchards or vegetable market gardens, and beautiful houses as it were scattered amongst them ... The place resembles a townhas a church, beautiful streets, well built and handsome houses of brick, three or four stories high . . .’

By the 1830s this essentially rural picture was changing and Chelsea had become a part of London. Agriculture was declining as building spread and in 1824 a new church, St. Luke’s, was completed to accommodate the rising congregation.

In the first half of the nineteenth century development in Kensington was still patchy. Edwardes Square at the west end of the Kensington Road – which started life as a Roman track leading to Brentford and is now the High Street – was built in 1811–19. Some building was also done on the Ladbroke Estate in the north of the parish. The Norland Estate to the west of Ladbroke was developed from 1839 and Kensington New Town, centred on Launceston Place and Victoria Grove, dates from the same period. Towards Knightsbridge, some building was taking place on the Smith’s Charity and Alexander Estates. However, a powerful stimulus towards more comprehensive development was on its way.

The 1851 Great Exhibition, held in a specially-erected ‘Crystal Palace’ in Hyde Park, proved an immense success. Not only did the Exhibition – a showcase for the art and technology of the new industrial age – make Kensington more fashionable, it was profitable. With the money, the exhibition commissioners purchased an estate of 87 acres in South Kensington and developed it as a centre for institutions devoted to the arts and sciences, amongst them the now world-renowned Natural History and Victoria and Albert museums. This building activity, which included several fine new roads, encouraged adjacent landowners to turn their hands to property development. As London boomed in the 1860s, communications with the City were further improved by the extension of the Metropolitan and District lines into Kensington, making it an even more sought after residential area.

The parish of Kensal, though on the Northern boundary of Kensington, belonged to Chelsea and had done so since medieval times. Kensal New Town, as it became known, was not developed until the mid-19th century when a small community grew up between and worked on the Grand Union Canal and the railway. There were also jobs to be had on the adjacent gasworks and in the new Kensal Green Cemetery. The section to the north of the Harrow Road became a model housing estate in the 1870s when the Queen’s Park Estate was erected by the Artisans’ Labourers’ and General Dwelling Company. The London Government Act of 1899 – which also created metropolitan boroughs – divided Kensal between the new boroughs of Paddington and Kensington. On the Kensington side, extensive post-war development has left little of the old Kensal to be seen.

Notting Hill was and is still well known for its street market in Portobello Road; named in commemoration of Admiral Vernon’s capture, in 1739, of Puerto Bello in the Caribbean. The market seems to have begun in the late 1860s or early 1870s and was originally held only on Saturdays. In 1920 the local Branch of the National Federation of Discharged and Demobilized Sailors and Soldiers, members of which were traders, lobbied for more opening days. It was several years before this was granted. In 1948 a thriving antiques section developed on the south side of the Portobello Road as a result of a temporary closure of the Caledonian Market.

Prior to the market, the area had other claims to fame: one was its racecourse. A large chunk of Notting Hill was covered by the Hippodrome racecourse during the late 1830s and early 1840s. For a while, it was Kensington’s answer to Cheltenham and Ascot but the heavy clay soil and financial attractions of property development meant the venture was quickly put out to grass.

Notting Hill is also renowned for its carnival, the largest in Europe by far. Carnival has its origins in a street party held on August bank holiday Monday 1964 for children of a local adventure playground. A steel band provided the music. Carnival operated on a local basis until the early seventies when it rapidly grew into the massive event we know today. It was local

Trinidadians who were behind the early carnivals, having brought the traditions of calypso, soca, steel bands and masquerade with them from home.

Many new residents arrived from the Caribbean during the 1950s and Notting Hill was the area of the borough they headed for in search of affordable housing. Down the centuries, Kensington and Chelsea has been home to many peoples fleeing oppression or seeking a better life for themselves and their children. Amongst them were Huguenots, who arrived after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and Moravians, a group of mid-European Protestants who found peace in Chelsea in 1750 after centuries of persecution. There has also been immigration from Ireland, particularly during the 1950s and 60s and after the famine of the 1840s. More recent arrivals include communities from Morocco, Spain, Portugal and a number of Middle-Eastern and African countries. There are also many North American and European residents and dozens of embassies.