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William Luker – a walk in the Gardens
The artist William Luker Jr devoted quite a few pictures to Kensington Gardens as his contribution to W J Loftie’s Kensington: Picturesque and Historical. Miss Charlotte Green, from this post, did not...
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Horse locomotion: at the Hippodrome
Among the many William Luker illustrations to Loftie’s Kensington: Picturesque and Historical is this one. At this size it just looks like a mound or hill with a small crowd of people and a few...
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Demolition: the fall of a town hall
In December 1983 I went down to Kensington High Street from North Kensington Library. It must have been one of those half days when I finished at one o’clock because it was around lunchtime. I saw from...
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Christmas Days – up on the roof
This is the first in my regular series of short posts for Christmas. If all goes to plan, there will be three more this week and one on Christmas Eve. Usually, the subject matter is small and/or...
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Christmas Days: pungently Burgundian
Regulars readers will have noticed that I’m using the phrase “regular readers” frequently these days, perhaps too frequently, but I have been writing this blog for seven years now, so a certain amount...
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Christmas Days: underground and round about
As we’re nearing the end of the year, and possibly the end of my tether, today’s post is mostly photographs, the work of that obscure photographer Dave Walker. These pictures were taken in 2014, so...
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Inside the old Town Hall
Kensington and Chelsea’s current Town Hall (construction images here) has been in use from 1975 onward. As we know from the recent post on its demolition , the old version was empty for nearly 8 years....
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Luker’s interiors
As I said in my first post about William Luker Jr, his illustrations to W J Loftie’s Kensington: Historical and Picturesque number over 300. So I haven’t covered all the best ones in two posts. There...
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The high life – at the Royal Palace Hotel
We caught a glimpse of the Royal Palace Hotel last week but it looked pretty dull and gloomy in that rather faded photograph, even though it was probably only a few years old. To capture the...
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Madame Bach Gladstone: water colours of a neighbourhood
Local Studies collections quite often contain water colour paintings by local residents. We’re all familiar with that trope of historical fiction and TV drama, the accomplished young lady who paints...
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The Kensington: a High Street Cinema
Ignore my name at the top of this post. (We still haven’t worked out how to add an author.) This weeks’s post was written by my co-author and colleague Isabel Hernandez who is continuing her work on...
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A little bit of retail history: Kensington High Street at the turn of another...
This is the first in a series of posts using photographs from a collection of images given to us by our Planning department. One of my volunteers has been going through the collection, sorting them out...
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Another post about shops and restaurants
This week’s post doesn’t travel far from the previous one. Just across the road in fact, to the north side of Kensington High Street. We’re looking back westwards at the first version of the Royal...
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At last the 1936 show: Barkers of Kensington
We’re moving west along Kensington High Street and we’ve now reached the Barkers building, opposite the point where the High Street intersects with Kensington Church Street. We’ll pause here this week...
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Happy shiny people: the ideal world
I love the illustrations that sometimes come with architectural drawings and planning applications. They depict an ideal near future for a place we know well, clean and well appointed, inhabited by...
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Kensington Roofworld
The author Christopher Fowler is famous for his Bryant and May series of novels about a pair of older detectives investigating “peculiar crimes” and for a series of supernatural novels and short...
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The main drag: shop till you drop
We’re back again at street level for this post and we’re continuing west, taking in the shops from the junction with Church street, concentrating on the branches of big names and the independents in...
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Short posts: looking back at the Commonwealth Institute part one
As part of my continuing trawl through photographs from our Planning collection I’ve been looking at the section preceding and following Earls Court Road. This of course includes the Commonwealth...
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Short posts – Bignell in the Park
I’ve been continuing my trawl through photographs from the Planning department connected to Kensington High Street. The ones dealing with The former Commonwealth Institute have been especially...
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Short posts – leisure
From time to time I have to scan pictures for enquiries and requests and inevitably you see other images you like in the picture chests and think “I should scan that as well”. So I often do, on the...
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