History of the Ladbroke Estate

Click on one of these links:
● TIMELINE 1066-1800
● THE LADBROKE ESTATE
● HIPPODROME RACE-COURSE NOTTING HILL
● FAMOUS RESIDENTS
● A SPECULATING CLERGYMAN ON THE LADBROKE ESTATE
● THEATRES OF THE LADBROKE AREA
● HISTORY OF STREET NAMES
● TRACING THE HISTORY OF YOUR HOUSE
● BOOKS ABOUT THE LADBROKE AREA

THE LADBROKE ESTATE

The GLC's Survey of London calls the Ladbroke Estate 'one of the finest townscapes in all London'. Yet this miniature garden city, a masterpiece of the romantic movement in town planning, was left to take its chance, exposed to neglect and reckless redevelopment for much of this century. Fortunately, in 1969, the Borough Council established it as a Conservation Area.

It was no accident that the picturesque style should take root and flourish in Notting Hill. The site was, for London, unusually exciting: an airy spur of Notting Hill plunging on three sides into the sticky hollows of Notting Dale. Both the main designers of the estate, Thomas Allason (1790-1852) and Thomas Allom (1804-1872) were well-known landscape artists as well as architects. Allason, commissioned by the Ladbroke family to begin the layout here in 1823, worked with the famous J B Papworth at Cheltenham. It was the fashionable air of Cheltenham's Lansdowne and Montpelier estates that the designers hoped to bring to this dangerous building venture beside the Piggeries and Potteries of north-west London.

In the event it took nearly fifty years to find buyers for all the houses, and the succession of grinding halts brought ruin to the main developers. But Allason s and Allom's design evolved unscathed. Indeed, the ruin of successive developers only added variety to the layout. This remained true to the spirit of rus in urbe which had inspired Wood's Bath, Nash's Regent's Park and Papworth's Cheltenham. There were classical groves alternating with tiers of leafy crescents, stucco villas alternating with plain brick terraces. The great spire of St John's loomed over the plane trees like an obelisk in a park. And everywhere there were gardens, private and half private, hidden and half hidden, glimpses of knolls and leafy dells, as though the real country began only a few steps beyond the last back door.

It was in the design of the fifteen communal gardens that Allason and Allom showed their greatest inventiveness. For two centuries the London square had faced outwards: terraces of private houses faced their private communal garden across a noisy and sometimes dangerous strip of pavements and roads. Allason and Allom turned the London square inside out, or (to be more precise) outside in. The rows of villas and terraces were designed to back onto communal pleasure grounds separated only by small private gardens. The pleasure grounds were thus more private, safer and more accessible to the residents. The Ladbroke estate remains the best example in the world of a miniature garden city designed on this delightful principle.

Thomas Pakenham

HIPPODROME RACE-COURSE NOTTING HILL

The year of Queen Victoria's accession, 1837, saw the inauguration of a new venture in West London - an attempt to establish a race-course which would rival Epsom and Ascot in its attractions. The prospectus, issued in 1836, stated that 'an extensive range of land, in a secluded situation, has been taken and thrown into one great Park, and is being fenced in all round by a strong, close, high paling. This Park affords the facilities of a STEEPLE-CHASE COURSE, intersected by banks and every description of fence; and also of a RACE-COURSE distinct from the Steeple-Chase Course; and each Course is capable of being suited to a Four Mile Race for Horses of the first class.'

The founder of this enterprise was a Mr John Whyte of Brace Cottage, Notting Hill, who had leased about 200 acres of ground from Mr James Weller Ladbroke, the ground landlord. The course as originally laid out was bounded approximately by Portobello Road, Elgin Crescent, Clarendon Road and the south side of Ladbroke Square. The main entrance was through an arch at the junction of Kensington Park Road with Pembridge Road. It was also intended to provide facilities for all forms of equestrian exercise and for other out-door sports on non-racing days.

The first meeting was held on 3rd June, 1837, with three races for a total prize list of £250 and was followed by a second meeting on the 19th. Although it was agreed that the company was brilliant and that many 'splendid equipages' were present, the quality of the racing met with a mixed reception, one writer calling the horses entered 'animated dogs' meat'. Furthermore, Mr Whyte, in his enthusiasm to enclose the course, had blocked up a right-of-way that crossed its centre and which enabled local residents to avoid the Potteries, a notorious slum. Some local inhabitants took the law into their own hands and cut the paling down at the point where the footpath entered the grounds of the race-course. As a result, the crowds on the first and subsequent days' racing were increased by the presence of unruly persons who, taking advantage of the footpath dispute, entered without paying for admission.

The next two years saw all attempts by Mr Whyte to close the footpath frustrated. There were summonses, counter summons, assaults, petitions to Parliament by the local inhabitants and the parochial authorities together with a wordy and scurrilous warfare in the columns of the press. There was even a plan at one time to make a subway under the race-course, but in 1839 Mr Whyte abandoned the unequal struggle and relinquished the eastern half of the ground.

The new course, renamed Victoria Park in honour of the young Queen, was extended northward to the vicinity of the present St Helen's Church, St Quintin's Avenue, and, as the prospectus pointed out, 'the race-course [was] lengthened, and much improved; and without interfering with the rights of the public, the footpath, which intersected the old ground, will now run at the outside of the Park...' A management committee composed of noblemen and gentlemen was formed and £50,000 capital was raised by the sale of £10 shares, the holder of two shares being entitled to a transferable ticket of admission.

Although the footpath question had been resolved, a more serious obstacle to the success of the venture soon became apparent. The soil was clay which made for heavy going and required extensive drainage. The nature of the ground made the course unusable at certain times of the year and this fault proved impossible to overcome. At the meeting held on June 2nd and 4th, 1841, the last race, a steeple-chase, was run. A set of four coloured lithographs, from paintings by Henry Aiken Junior, commemorate this event. In all, thirteen meetings had been held during the four years of the course's history.

In 1840 a Mr Jacob Connop had been granted building leases for the eastern part of the race- course relinquished by Whyte and by March 1841 he seems to have become the proprietor of the race-course as well. By the following year Connop, in conjunction with another builder, John Duncan, was developing the estate for the ground landlord, James Ladbroke. Houses were built in what is now Kensington Park Road and Ladbroke Square but in 1845 Connop was declared bankrupt and the work had to be taken over by others. Thus it would seem that no one closely involved in the Hippodrome venture gained much from it and today the names Hippodrome Mews and Hippodrome Place remain to remind people that Notting Hill might under other circumstances have become another Epsom or Ascot.

Taken from the Kensington and Chelsea Public Libraries Occasional Notes no 2, January 1969, by Brian Curie, then the Local History Librarian. These notes were compiled from contemporary news-cuttings, prints and plans together with the following accounts, all of which may be seen in the Kensington Local History Collection at the Central Library, Hornton Street, W8.
Reproduced by kind permission of the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea.
For further reading:

These passages come from an article by the architectural historian Mark Girouard that first appeared in Country Life on 2 October 1975 under the Title “A speculating clergyman: Dr Walker in Cornwall and London”.

An intimate connection between a Victorian vicarage in Cornwall and rows of stucco houses in North Kensington seems, on the face of it, unlikely. One does not expect country clergymen to go in for property development on a huge scale, still less to go bankrupt (or all but bankrupt) owing £90,000, and have to leave the country. Such, however, was the curious story of Dr Samuel Edmund Walker (1810-69), London property speculator and Rector of St Columb Major, Cornwall.

The story came about because he had a rich father. Edmund Walker, senior, was a successful solicitor who indulged in a little speculation as a sideline. From 1809 until his death in 1851 he also worked in the Exchequer Office of Pleas, of which he became Master in 1832. The organisation of the London legal world in the early 19th century seems, nowadays, to be wrapped in Dickensian fog; but whatever it involved, Mastership of the Exchequer Office clearly brought in plenty of money, for Edmund Walker died worth about £250,000.

From this prosperous background Samuel Walker graduated at Trinity College, Cambridge, took orders, served briefly as a curate, and was then fitted out by his father with a prosperous living. As early as 1826 Edmund Walker had purchased the advowson of St Columb Major, Cornwall, for £12,000. It was a moderate sum for a valuable benefice, but the price must have been conditioned by the existence of a live rector, who had security of tenure until his death. This took place in 1841, upon which Edmund Walker presented the living to his son.
                                       ……………………………
[Samuel Walker’s] father … died in 1851, leaving him, it was said, a fortune of a quarter of a million pounds. The innocent and hopeful son appears to have thought that by speculating in buildings he could increase their legacy to provide a really handsome endowment for [a proposed Cornish bishopric to be based at St Columb]. The full story has been worked out by the Survey of London in their invaluable Northern Kensington volume. As the Survey puts it (quoting from a contemporary obituary): "being 'of a most amicable disposition, regardless of all selfish interests, sincere in the views he took, and truly religious in heart and life' he proved ill-equipped for the hurly-burly of suburban speculations".

After a preliminary, and unidentifiable, flutter in Gravesend Dr Walker turned his attentions to the Ladbroke estate in North Kensington, where the former Hippodrome racecourse was being sold off by the Ladbroke family for building. His father had had an interest in this in the early 1840s, but had sold out; it was probably this connection which drew his son's attention to the area, with disastrous results. Between 1852 and 1855 he bought wildly, at top prices, and in the wrong places. In all he acquired 56 acres of freehold land in North Kensington, and contracted to buy another 34 acres. He expended, or made himself liable for, about £90,000. About half of this land was bought from the Ladbroke estate; and, in addition, to the east of this he bought, or contracted to buy, the southern 51½  acres of the Portobello farm. Portobello Farm belonged to two heiress sisters, the Misses Talbot, who on the strength of this and future sales retired to Bournemouth and devoted themselves to philanthropy and the building of a model village. In 1852 they had put the whole of the farm, amounting to 166 acres, up for sale, but the gullible Dr Walker was the only buyer; other developers considered, rightly enough, that the area was not yet ripe for development. Dr Walker was associated in his purchases with two old hands in the Kensington estate market, Richard Roy and Charles Henry Blake. Somehow, when the buying was over, Blake and Roy ended up with compact and desirable properties on the crest of the hill where Ladbroke Grove now runs, while Dr Walker was landed with a sprawling and much more dubious property down the hill to the north and north east.

Building began straight away.   On the Walker land it fell into two groups.   On what was to become Elgin Crescent, Lansdowne Road and the northern end of Clarendon Road, rows of stucco terraces began to go up.  They were erected on building leases by builders whom Walker obligingly lent all the money they needed.  He lent out some £60,000 in this way at no security except that of the houses they were building.   The main borrower was a builder called David Allan Ramsay, but a number of others were also involved. The results were typical of speculative building at the time, and though agreeable were not especially distinctive; the houses had none of the amazing bravura of those designed by Thomas Allom for C. H. Blake in and around Kensington Park Gardens.    Walker's houses must either have been designed by the builders themselves or by minor architect-surveyors.  The most entertaining are a row in Lansdowne Road, where the customary parapets are intersected by shaped Flemish gables, with agreeably eccentric results.

 It seems unlikely that Dr Walker had much interest in these houses, except as a future source of income. His particular concern was on the Portobello end of his estate. Here in 1852, he started to build a church. This project was, as his projects tended to be, a grandiloquent one. The church was unusually large, its steeple was intended to be unusually high, and it was all faced with the best Bath stone. Moreover, next to the church he planned to build a rectory and a group of collegial buildings, connected with the church by a cloister.   In the early 1850s these remained in the future; the surrounding houses, which were to provide the congregation, had scarcely gone beyond the sewers; but the church itself was rapidly approached completion. 

It was dedicated to All Saints and the road on which it stood (now Talbot Road) was named St Columb's Road. The architect, once again, was William White. He designed a church which, had it been completed, would have been one of the most memorable Victorian churches in London; and which still, without its spire and with an incomplete and largely redecorated interior, is a remarkably handsome building. The tower is extraordinarily elegant; the slim buttresses soar up for five stages with only the slightest of set backs and then become free standing, linked at the top by arches to an octagonal lantern surrounded by an arcade of marble columns. Above this is the truncated base of the spire, like the platform for a rocket which has taken off into space.

But before work on the spire could be started Dr Walker had sunk beneath "the floods of financial disaster. His speculations had got under way at the wrong end of a building boom. Supply far outran demand, and in 1854 there was a slump. The new houses found no buyers; Dr Walker, on the wrong side of the hill, was in the worst position of all. In February 1854 his main creditor and the main builder on his estate, D. A. Ramsay, went bankrupt. Dr Walker struggled on for a year; m February 1855 he was still hopefully buying and, but was quite unable to pay for it. In March he handed over the management of his estate to three trustees and retired to the Continent.

He left behind him a scene of chaos and desolation.   His estate was covered with rows of empty or half-finished houses, or acres of mud interspersed by the beginnings of drains and roads.    Out of the desert rose the unfinished hulk of All Saints, soon to be known locally as All Sinners-in-the-mud. Six years later the Building News described "the naked carcases, crumbling decorations, fractured walls and slimy cement-work, upon which the summer’s heat and winter’s rain have left their damaging mark . . . the whole estate was as a graveyard of buried hopes". On Ladbroke Grove, a solitary pub, the Elgin Arms, stood alone "in a dreary waste of mud and stunted trees . . . with the wind howling and vagrants prowling in the speculative warnings around them". 

By then, however, the area was beginning to recover, as London inexorably expanded. All Saints, after five years of standing abandoned, was finished off in 1861, on the cheap and by a different architect. The unfinished houses were gradually completed, the derelict spaces filled with new building. Dr Walker managed to sell off what property he had preserved, and recovered sufficient credit to allow him to return and live in England.

He died in Hampstead in 1869 and did not live to see the final founding of a Cornish bishopric, based, however, on Truro rather than St Columb.

 Reproduced by kind permission of Mark Girouard and Country Life.

HISTORY OF STREET NAMES IN
THE LADBROKE CONSERVATION AREA

Until the early 19th century, the Ladbroke area was largely country and almost none of the current roads existed (the main exceptions were the Uxbridge Road – now Holland Park Avenue – along the southern border of the Ladbroke estate; and Portobello Lane, now Portobello Road). During the building boom of the 19th century, the owners of the area developed the land and what are today’s streets were gradually created. The main method of development was the granting of building leases by the landowners to undertakers (usually builders or surveyors), who then built whole terraces or in some cases whole streets of houses. Apart from the “Ladbroke” streets (named after the original owner/developer of the area), most of the streets seem to have been given their names by the whim of the developer or builder concerned. Often they seem to have been named after some place with which that individual developer happened to be associated, or after a distinguished statesman whom the developer presumably admired. Originally, many of the individual rows of houses in each street had their own names, but later in the 19th century these were formally incorporated into the streets
on which they were situated and given their present street numbers.

ARUNDEL GARDENS
Built in the early 1860s. The south side of the street was originally known as Lansdowne Road Terrace (this is the name given to it, for instance, in an 1858 covenant between Richard Roy, the then main developer of this area, and the freeholders and leaseholders of building plots and “houses in carcase” on that side of the road). The origin of the street name Arundel Gardens is not known. Arundel in Sussex is the seat of the Howard family, Dukes of Norfolk, and the name is common as a street name in areas that are or were owned by the Duke of Norfolk, but that is not the case here.

BLENHEIM CRESCENT
In the 1860s, when the main construction began in what is now Blenheim Terrace, the section of street east of Ladbroke Grove was called St Columb Road and the section west of Ladbroke Grove was called Sussex Road. Blenheim Terrace was the name given to one of the first rows of houses built in the then Sussex Road, presumably after the Duke of Marlborough’s famous victory over the French and Bavarians at Blenheim in Bavaria in 1704. The name was subsequently given to the whole street.

BOYNE TERRACE MEWS
Built around 1871. Probably named after Boyne House, which stood on the site of Holland Park tube station. The first four houses to the east of Boyne House (numbers 68-74 (evens) Holland Park Avenue) were originally called Boyne Terrace, and Boyne Terrace Mews provided accommodation for the horses and carriages belonging to these houses and those in the next terrace along.

BULMER MEWS
Bulmer Mews was built probably first in the 1850s. It seems originally to have been called Victoria Mews. But by 1881 it had been renamed Albert Mews or Prince Albert Mews after the pub down the side of which it runs. It seems to have been given its present name of Bulmer Mews in the 1930s
by association with a little street called Bulmer Place that ran down the other side of the pub roughly where the service road for the shops on the
north-west side of Notting Hill Gate now runs. It is not clear where the name Bulmer comes from.

CHEPSTOW VILLAS
Built in the mid 1840s. The developer, William Henry Jenkins, came from Hereford and appears to have chosen the name Chepstow after the town of Chepstow near his home. The neighbouring Denbigh Terrace, Ledbury Road and Pembridge Road were named for similar reasons.

CLARENDON ROAD
Built in the 1840s and 1850s. The reason for the street name is not known, but probably refers to one of the Earls of Clarendon. Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon (1609-1674), was the father of Anne Hyde, who married the future James II and was the mother of Queen Mary (of William and Mary) and Queen Anne. The 4th Earl of Clarendon (1800-1870) was a well-known 19th century statesman, who occupied a number of senior Ministerial posts around the time that Clarendon Road was being built.

Originally, many of the Clarendon Road terraces had their own names. These included Park Villas; Clarendon Terrace (16-26 evens Clarendon Road); Clarendon Villas; Clarendon Villas North; Grove Terrace; Cambridge Villas; Hanover Terrace Villas (Hanover Terrace was the old name of Lansdowne Walk); and St James’s Terrace. These were all formally incorporated into Clarendon Road and given their current numbers in 1861.

CODRINGTON MEWS
Not known, but maybe after Admiral Sir Edward Codrington (1770-1851), who commanded a ship at Trafalgar, led the fleet at Washington and Baltimore in the American War and commanded the combined fleets of Britain, France and Russia at the battle of Navarino.

CORNWALL CRESCENT.
The present crescent was built in the early 1860s. The Rev. Dr Samuel Walker of St Columb Major in north Cornwall owned land here and lost a fortune from unwise building speculation.

ELGIN CRESCENT
Built mainly in the 1850s. Origin of the name unknown, but possibly after the contemporaneous Earl of Elgin, who was active on a variety of diplomatic missions and subsequently became Viceroy of India.

Originally, numbers 2-126 Elgin Crescent were known as Elgin Road. There were also two terraces with their own names: St John’s Terrace (numbers 63-81) and Wellington Terrace.

HOLLAND PARK AVENUE
In 1641, Sir Henry Rich, subsequently Earl of Holland, inherited the estate of his father-in-law Sir Walter Cope. This included what is now Holland Park and a lot of other land around it. In 1605, Cope had built himself a house (the present semi-ruined Holland House in Holland Park), which was first known as Cope’s Castle. His son-in-law changed the name to Holland House, and the garden and parkland around the house became known as Holland Park. The Rich family title died out in 1759, but in 1763 the Fox family, the new owners of Holland House, were created Barons Holland, so the name lived on and was used for a number of nearby streets, including Holland Park Avenue.

Originally, Holland Park Avenue was known as the Uxbridge Road, as it was the main road out of London to Uxbridge (and its continuation beyond Shepherd’s Bush is still known by that name). It is an extremely ancient thoroughfare, probably dating back to Saxon times, and formed the southern boundary of the estate acquired by the Ladbroke family in the mid 1770s.

Many of the individual terraces along Holland Park Avenue originally had their own names. These included Grove Terrace (between the Underground station and Clarendon Road); Boyne Terrace (numbers 68-74 evens, immediately to the east of the Underground station); and Notting Hill Terrace (east of Ladbroke Grove). Campden Hill Square, on the other side of the road, was also at that time known as Notting Hill Square.

HORBURY CRESCENT and HORBURY MEWS
Horbury Crescent was built in the 1850s. The Crescent and Mews were named after Horbury in West Yorkshire, the home town of the then treasurer and deacon of Horbury Chapel (now the Kensington Temple).

KENSINGTON PARK GARDENS and KENSINGTON PARK ROAD
“Kensington Park” was the name chosen by the developer Pearson Thompson when in 1842 he prepared a grandiose and only partly realised plan for developing this part of the Ladbroke estate after the collapse of the Hippodrome race-course.. Kensington Park Road originally had a number of separately named terraces: Horbury Terrace; Kensington Park Villas; Kensington Park Gardens East; Kensington Park Terrace; St Peter’s Terrace; Kensington Park Terrace North (the name of which can still be seen inscribed on numbers 152 and 154, the central houses of the terrace); Howard
Place; Sussex Terrace; and Convent Terrace.

LADBROKE CRESCENT, GARDENS, GROVE, ROAD, SQUARE, TERRACE and WALK
The Ladbroke family, who were wealthy bankers, acquired the land which is now the Ladbroke estate probably in the mid-18th century. It was then country. In 1819 the land descended from Richard Ladbroke to his nephew James Weller, on condition that the latter took the name of Ladbroke. The 1820s saw a boom in housebuilding in North Kensington, encouraging James Weller Ladbroke to invite developers to build houses on his land, and several of the new streets thus created were named after him.

LADBROKE GROVE
There were a number of separately named terraces in Ladbroke Grove, including Ladbroke Place; Rosedale Terrace (numbers 11-19); Ladbroke Place West (numbers 21-35); Lansdowne Terrace (between Lansdowne Walk and St John’s church); Upper Lansdowne Terrace (numbers 67-75); Elgin Villas; Codrington Villas; Beresford Terrace; Buckingham Terrace; Rosedale Villas; Stanley Villas (between Kensington Park Gardens and Ladbroke Gardens); Codrington Terrace; and Elgin Terrace. These were all formally subsumed into Ladbroke Grove in 1869.

LADBROKE ROAD
Originally only the part of Ladbroke Road nearest Notting Hill Gate was known by this name. The part of the street between Ladbroke Terrace and Ladbroke Grove was called Weller Street after James Weller Ladbroke. The next section, between Ladbroke Grove and Portland Road, was earlier known as Ladbroke Villas.

LADBROKE WALK
Ladbroke Walk was originally called Ladbroke Terrace Mews, presumably because it served as mews for the horses and carriages of the occupants of the houses in Ladbroke Terrace.

LANSDOWNE CRESCENT, MEWS, RISE, ROAD AND WALK
All of these were built in the 1840s and were named after the Lansdowne area of Cheltenham, where the developers, Pearson Thompson and Richard Roy, had been active. Lansdowne Walk was known first as Queen’s Terrace and then as Hanover Terrace; and Lansdowne Rise was until 1937 known as Montpelier Road (Montpelier was a popular street name after the Napoleonic wars, as the French sent captured British officers there on parole, and many British prisoners-of war returned with fond memories of the place; Montpellier was also the name of another district of Cheltenham developed by
Pearson Thompson).
Lansdowne Road had three separately named terraces: Lansdowne Villas (numbers 2-12 evens); Lansdowne Terrace; and Moreton Villas. They were subsumed into Lansdowne Road in 1863.

PORTOBELLO ROAD
Originally called Portobello Lane and under that name it dates back in the rate books to 1842. But it was in existence earlier and commemorates the name of the farm to which it led. The name probably derived from the 1739 capture of Puerto Bello in Central America from the Spaniards by Admiral Vernon (1684-1757) with only six ships.

ROSMEAD ROAD (built around 1898)
It was originally called Chichester Road: this is, for instance the name that appears on the Ordnance Survey map of 1894-96; by the time of the 1912 edition it had acquired its present name, probably after the 1st Baron Rosmead, a distinguished British colonial administrator (chiefly in the Far East and South Africa), who died in 1898.

ST MARKS PLACE and ST MARKS ROAD
Named after the nearby church of St Mark’s, built in 1863. St Mark’s Place was originally called Chapel Road after the Baptist Chapel that stood on the north-east corner of Cornwall Crescent.

STANLEY CRESCENT and STANLEY GARDENS
Built in the 1850s. Probably named after the noted politician Edward Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, who became Prime Minister in 1852. There used also to be a Stanley Gardens Mews, which ran down the north side of St Peter’s church. All that is rest of it now is the car-park behind the Notting Hill Brasserie.

VERNON YARD
Probably commemorates Admiral Vernon (see entry for Portobello Road above). The terrace of houses in Portobello Road that backs onto the mews was originally called Vernon Terrace, and the mews no doubt served these houses.

WESTBOURNE GROVE
Westbourne Grove was originally known as Archer Street, after a Mr Archer who owned land in the area. It was given its present name in 1938, although it continued to be called Archer Street by people in the area for some years afterwards.

The Westbourne is one of London’s lost rivers. It was a stream that ran down from Hampstead into the Thames, passing not far from Westbourne Grove, crossing what is now the beginning of Bishop’s Bridge Road. Today, it runs entirely underground except where it emerges above ground near Lancaster Gate to become the Serpentine.

Only the short section of Westbourne Grove between Kensington Park Gardens and Portobello Road is in the Ladbroke area.

WILBY MEWS
Probably named after Benjamin Wilby, who was involved in several 19th century development schemes in the area.


Sophia Lambert, March 2008/August 2009.

Sources include:

Volume XXXVII of the Survey of London, published for the Greater London Council in 1973;

Kensington and Chelsea Street-Names: a guide to their meanings,
compiled by B. R. Curle and Mrs P. K. Pratt, published by Kensington and Chelsea
Libraries and Arts Service, 1980;

Ordnance Survey maps of 1862-5; 1894-6; and 1912.
 

TRACING THE HISTORY OF YOUR HOUSE

This can be a fascinating and rewarding study and enjoyed by all the family. All the sources listed below can be found in  the Local Studies section of the Kensington Central Library. Before visiting the library, do check for any documentary sources you may have at home, e.g. deeds, land registry documents or architectural plans detailing alterations. It may also be useful to familiarise yourself with the general history of the area. An introduction can be found on the Ladbroke Association website, and histories of each street in the area are also being progressively posted on the website. Books about the area include:

• Notting Hill in Bygone Days, by Florence Gladstone, originally published in 1924 and republished in 1969 with additional material by Ashley Barker (Anne Bingley).

• Notting Hill and Holland Park Past, by Barbara Denny (Historical Publications, 1993).

• Notting Hill Behind the Scenes, by Hermione Campion, (BehindTheScenesPublishing.com, 2007) – contains many old photographs of the area.

Colin Thorn's book Researching London's Houses (Historical Publications 2005) is particularly recommended, as it explains in detail the purpose of and how to use the sources listed below and many others available in other repositories.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Buildings and architecture

Survey of London
Vol. 39, Chapter 9 (pp. 194-257) of the Survey of London (published by the Greater London Council in 1973) gives a very detailed description of the development of the Ladbroke Estate, including a list of building leases with dates, developer and builder. It is also available on line at www.british-history.ac.uk/surveyoflondon.

Maps
The best visual and instantly understandable resource is maps. The Local Studies section has a good collection of old maps in their map cases. Prior to 1860 parish maps are useful, as are large scale London maps such as Davies of 1841 and 1847.

The Ordnance Survey large-scale maps (5' and 25" to a mile) show the site, size and shape of individual houses, sometimes even garden design, and the immediate street layout. These were first produced in the 1860s and revised in 1890s, early 20th century and 1930s. Note, however, that street names and house numbering systems have sometimes changed and many streets and houses only acquired their present names and numbers in the 1860s or later. In particular, it was common in the first half of the 19th century for each terrace in a street to have its own name and numbering system. It may be easiest, therefore, to start with the 1935 Land Registry edition, which includes house numbers, and work backwards making notes of any changes to street names and alterations to the house.

Plans
The History Index in the Local Studies section, arranged alphabetically, gives references to all metropolitan and borough plans held in the archives. These include early sewer plans (from 1856); street naming and numbering plans (especially important as hours can be wasted researching the wrong house); and building applications (1872-1925). Plans can also be found attached to manuscripts and these are accessed via the manuscript index. Another useful series of plans are drainage applications which date from 1850s. Nearly every house has at least one application but coverage and detail can vary from sketch plans and outlines to detailed elevations and floor plans. They also show when a house changed from single to multi-occupancy and sometimes back to single occupancy.

Vestry records 1855-1900
These include minutes and surveyors' returns. Exact references can be found in the Survey of London.

Deeds and manuscripts
A search of the manuscript index in the Local Studies Section will quickly show any property deeds relating to your house that are held in the archives. There is a particularly good collection of deeds relating to houses put up William Drew and Richard Roy. Although reading these deeds can be challenging in terms of both the legal jargon and the Victorian penmanship, they do contain a wealth of information, including dates of sales, terms of tenancies, purchase prices, rents, and names and addresses of owners, tenants, sellers and purchasers or mortgagees. Usually the most important parts of the document can be easily identified as the first words are written in bold and/or capitals.

Rate and valuation books
These offer an accurate record of occupiers and value of property and are an invaluable aid to tracing the history of a street and individual houses. Rates were collected twice yearly. A relatively complete set of books from the mid 18th to mid 19th century is held at the Local Studies Section. After that period quinquennial valuation books are held. The 1910 “New Domesday” books give a very detailed snapshot of properties, showing their owners and occupiers at the beginning of the 20th century

Planning records
The planning history of individual houses can be consulted on microfiche in the Planning section of the Town Hall in Hornton Street. The records mostly go back to the 1950s and sometimes to the 1930s. Many – especially the more recent ones – have been scanned and can also be consulted on the RBKC website.

Bomb incident cards
These contemporaneous warden’s reports are arranged alphabetically by street and give date of incident, type of bomb, damage caused and casualties.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Owners and occupiers
Census returns
The ten-yearly census returns for 1841-1901 are available on microfilm in the Local Studies Centre, although unfortunately the part of the 1841 census that covered the Ladbroke estate has been lost. The 1911 census has recently been released on a pay-per-search basis via the internet. The census returns give details of all members of the household, their ages, occupations and place of birth.

Directories
The most useful are the local street directories dating from the late 19th century but earlier London wide ones are available on microfilm. Court guides (directories listing the names and addresses of people of standing) are also useful for the Ladbroke area.

Electoral rolls
These are the best source of information on late 19th and early 20th century residents and are arranged by polling district and then by street. From 1890 to 1894, the Ladbroke area is divided between three polling districts: Pembridge, Ladbroke and Norland; from 1895 onwards, all the relevant streets are listed under the Pembridge and Norland polling districts.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Other sources

Illustrations
There is a large but not comprehensive collection of drawings, postcards and photographs in the Local Studies section that has been built up since 1888. Coverage of the Ladbroke area is quite good especially of postcards dating from 1902-1910. There is also a more recent photographic survey undertaken in the late 1960sto early 1970s.

The Ladbroke Association has also undertaken its own photographic survey, with photographs of every house front in the area taken between 2003 and 2008. This is on CD.

Ephemera
Including estate agent particulars and newspaper cuttings on properties and
residents. These are filed under streets in the Local Studies section.

Carolyn Starren
March 2009