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Closing down Pettits – October 1977
From this end of retail history it’s in some ways quite surprising that the old department stores of Kensington High Street lasted as long as they did. I can remember the giant of the High Street,...
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St Mary Abbots – Kensington’s parish church
This week’s post features the return of regular contributor Isabel Hernandez who has been looking into the history of one of Kensington’s most iconic buildings. “One of the handsomest churches in the...
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A room decorated by Conder
1982. An estate agent’s brochure announces the sale of a large property in North Kensington just off Holland Park Avenue. The brochure speaks of a room with “polished satinwood panels painted in the...
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A shoot in Ladbroke Grove: Part Two – W10
Last week we left off at Ladbroke Grove station. This is the dark looking entrance on the north side of the bridge in the shadow of the Westway. Note the tiny branch of the record shop Dub Vendor right...
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Dulac in Kensington
This post starts with someone we’ve encountered before: the art collector and patron Edmund Davis. As we learned in the post about a room decorated for Davis by Charles Conder this picture shows...
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Mr Railton’s Haunted House
The approach to Christmas is also traditionally the time for ghost stories. The most famous of British writers of ghost stories, M R James, often gathered together friends or students at this time of...
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Christmas days: a preview for Estella
Only the second year of short posts for Christmas week and I’m already breaking my own rules. I had intended these posts to cover subjects where there wasn’t much to say or where we only had a few...
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The Science District: some streets in W10 1969-70
Okay, I made the name up. Nobody ever called a few streets in North Kensington by that term. You’ll see what I did by their names: Faraday, Telford, Murchison (named after scientists and engineers in...
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What Estella saw
`In 1965 a woman died in an old house in Palace Green, a house she had lived in all her life. The house had once been the laundry of Kensington Palace but her parents had just been looking for a...
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In Estella’s house
In the previous post about Estella Canziani I showed you some of the pictures she painted or drew of the garden and the area around the house she lived in for her whole life. This week we’re...
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Dulac and Shakespeare: faeries and phantoms
The first two decades of the twentieth century are sometimes referred to as the golden age of book illustration. It was a combination of skilled artists, advances in printing techniques and a book...
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A Renaissance Library for All: Kensington’s Central Library
There were a couple of false launches this week, for which my apologies. They were nothing to do with the author of this post, my co-blogger Isabel Hernandez. To make up for the errors this is one of...
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Markino returns: alone in this world
The recent Christmas post I did about Yoshio Markino, the Japanese artist who lived in Chelsea, reminded me that there were still some images I hadn’t used in a post, even though I wrote four about him...
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Backwaters: behind the streets you know
A quiet secluded spot not that far from here. Some of this week’s pictures are places you can still go to today, others have vanished entirely. Most of them are quite different now. All of them are...
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Pelham Street 1970: down by the station
Anyone who lives in the South Kensington area will probably recognise this view even though the picture was taken about 1970. The building is Malvern Court. On the right side is Onslow Gardens, where...
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Backwaters 2
I was going to do a sequel to Backwaters a couple of weeks ago when I got sidetracked onto Pelham Street so this week we’re going back to the mewses crowded with parked cars and street names you can’t...
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Louisa’s album, and other memories of an ancient house
Louisa Boscowen Goldsmid’s album is a threadbare scrapbook with a stained fabric cover. Inside it are a set of watercolours. Mrs Goldsmid was clearly an amateur but like other amateur artists featured...
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Now you see it, now you don’t..now you see it again
We’re still having technical problems here so this week’s post is one I’ve had in draft form for some time because I wasn’t sure about it. It’s just a shaggy dog story really which I’m telling because...
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Redevelopment: Notting Hill Gate 1958-60
The main drag at Notting Hill Gate is probably not one of the most architecturally distinguished parts of London. The north side of the road, west of Pembridge Road is a plain row of shops with the...
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Gloucester Road – gateway to London
Last week at Notting Hill Gate I looked at one of the deepest layers of my personal archaeology of London. This time I’m going to begin at an even deeper level.When I first came to London in 1973 I...
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