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Inside Coleherne Court: 1876
Welcome back to Coleherne Court. Come inside. The unknown lady and her dog will be pleased to let you look around. As mentioned last week Coleherne Court (aka Coleherne House) was occupied from 1865 to...
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Building site 1972-1975: Kensington Town Hall
I was talking to a meeting about blogging the other day and I showed the group a couple of pictures from the post about the Red House, like this one. They were interested so I decided to take the story...
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The School Play: Queen’s Gate School 1905-1913
I came across these pictures while looking for a complete copy of a single school magazine from Catharine Lodge. At the same class number where the magazine should have been was a small collection of...
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The secret life of postcards 3: walking around in the afternoon
I was going to call this post “Son of the secret life of postcards” in homage to the naming of old fashioned horror fims (Son of Dracula, Son of Frankenstein etc) but not everybody would get that...
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Bladen Lodge and Bousfield School: 20th century Brompton
When I was writing some of the recent posts about the Old Brompton area I made a list of the named individual houses along and near the Old Brompton Road to help me. The fascination of that area for...
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Down Brompton Lane: more houses and stories
This is another leg in our journey through Old Brompton in the first half of the 19th century when Brompton Lane (now Old Brompton Road) was a main artery linking Fulham with the Kensington Turnpike....
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Shepherd in Kensington
Thomas Hosmer Shepherd doesn’t get a whole entry to himself in the Dictionary of National Biography. The details of his life are tagged on to the entry about his more eminent older brother George...
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Masks of fashion: Clementina and the room of stars
I’ve wanted to find a good reason to come back to Clementina, Lady Hawarden and her brief career exploring costume, fabric and light within the confines of a few rooms in her house at Princes Gardens....
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An actor’s life for me: Lena Ashwell
The first time I read the name Lena Ashwell was in connection with a production in 1902 of the Japan-set drama The Darling of the Gods. The second time I came across her was on a walk through 1970s...
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Adventure: playing out in Telford Road
Adventure playgrounds were a feature of childhood/adolescence which passed me by really. I wasn’t brought up in London and they were mostly I think a phenomenon of urban life. I saw plenty of them when...
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Through the glass to Kensington High Street
In a quiet corner of the sub-basement is a cupboard. Inside are a set of shelves. Most of the space is taken up with ledgers from a chemist’s shop with lists of prescriptions. These records go up to...
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One man’s war: Randle Barnett Barker 1870-1918
This week’s guest blogger is writer Lucy Yates who is working with me in our Local Studies department on a World War 1 project. She has been looking at some of the unique material in our archives. ‘The...
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Dreams of the Westway 1: Concrete Gothic
I last did a post on the building of the Westway in 2013. A reader of the blog had sent me some pictures of the construction work probably originally taken for Laing, the company that built the...
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A little bit of faded grandeur – country life in Kensington
Inevitably, I came across the photograph below while looking for something else. If you had no idea where or when it was, what would you have guessed? Trees, a lawn, part of a building, a cloudy sky...
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Sunny afternoon: a garden party in Holland Park
The taxman’s taken all my dough / and left me in my stately home /Lazing on a sunny afternoon. [Ray Davies] After last week’s look at a couple of the lost houses of Campden Hill I was reminded that I’d...
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Dreams of the Westway 2: Desolation Row
Here is one view of a street called Maxilla Gardens and how it might have looked after the completion of the Westway. You could derive any number of ideas about the assumptions in this idealised view...
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Faeries in Kensington Gardens
We’re getting close to Christmas now so what about something a little seasonal? I don’t much like Peter Pan. The familiar story of the irritating boy and the nice crocodile who never gets to eat him...
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Christmas Days: A street in Kensington
This is the first of my Christmas bite-size mini-posts, daily for as long as I can stand it. A few pictures and a few words. I’ll publish mid evening to see how that goes. I don’t know about any other...
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Christmas days: snow and ice
We should really have turned to something seasonal by now. Do you remember the winter of 1963? I suspect it’s a case of you had to be there. This picture is from that January in Campden Hill Road,...
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Christmas Days: in another Kensington garden
Today’s post is the last of my Christmas mini-posts and this one has nothing to do with the time of year. Consider it the equivalent of one of those nostalgic TV costume dramas. We’re back in another...
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