Little Chelsea
The district to the North of the Kings Road was formerly known as Little Chelsea, and remained a rural hamlet until about 1860.

Old Earl's Court or Food for London
Earl's Court Village was centred around the old Manor House which was owned by a tenant farmer who ran the market gardens on this part of the Gunter estate. The area was well known for prodviding food to the growing metropolis. In 1825, William Cobbett described in detail the cornfields of Earl's Court. The old Manor House stood on a site beside Earl's Court station. Opposite, on the east side of Earl's Court Lane (now Road) stood the Georgian mansion, Earl's Court House, which had been built in the 18th century by Sir John Hunter (1728-1793), the founder of scientific surgery. His museum is in the Royal College of Surgeons of England. It had a large walled garden (taking in what is now the whole of Barkston Gardens), within which Hunter kept his private zoo. In 1870, the house, which for a time had become a lunatic asylum for young ladies, was the residence of Captain Robert Gunter, who was responsible for the area we know today.

The American Exhibition of 1887, featuring William Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, was one of the first to be held at Earl's Court, and exhibitions continued until 1914 when the site was requisitioned for Government service. The buildings remained empty until 1937 when the present exhibition centre, the largest indoor stadium and exhibition hall to be built in Europe at that time was opened.

A prominent landmark of the Earl's Court Exhibition was the forerunner of the London Eye, the Great Wheel, erected in 1894, and a popular attraction until 1907.

Earl's Court Underground Station was opened in 1871 and was originally intended to aid the transport of produce from the local market gardens to the City. Earl's Court was the first station in the world to install a public escalator, opening on 4 October 1911. These escalators were of the shunt variety where passengers stepped off them sideways.

The local area has long been associated with London Underground with the main LT engineering works at Lillie Bridge by Earl's Court Station. From 1905 to 2000, the power station in Lots Road generated much of the "electrolisation" used by the underground system.

As well as the escalator, Earl's Court has also given the world the "rawlplug" - invented by George Rawlings of Rawlings Bros garage in Ashburn Mews, moving in 1921 to Cromwell Road as The Rawlplug Co. Ltd.

Theatres in the Local Area
Theatres in the local area include the Finborough Theatre and the recently built Chelsea Theatre at World's End. The Man in the Moon Theatre was one of London's better known fringe theatres from 1981 until its closure in September 2002.

Other theatres included the Chelsea Palace Theatre at 232-242 Kings Road, opened in 1903 and finally closed in 1957. This 2500 seat venue played host to such great performers as Sir George Robey, Vesta Tilley, Wee Georgie Wood, Gracie Fields, and Sir Harry Lauder.

The dancer and teacher Margaret Morris planned a new theatre for dance in the King's Road to designs by the eminent architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, although lack of funding prevented its execution.

Closer to the Finborough Theatre in spirit was the New Boltons Theatre in Drayton Gardens which presented new writing in the late 1940s under the direction of Peter Cotes.

The streets around Lots Road, Kings Road and Cheyne Walk were once the site of Cremorne Gardens, one of London's principal summer pleasure summer resorts until its closure in 1877. It covered sixteen acres and included a theatre, a circus, an outdoor orchestra, grottoes and a dance hall.

In the summer of 1845, numerous balloon ascents were made from Cremorne Gardens by a Mr and Mrs Green. A later attempt by a Mr de Groot resulted in disaster as the machine fell to ground around the Sydney Street area, killing its unfortunate occupant (who is buried in Brompton Cemetery).

Nineteenth Century Development
Until the development in the 1860s, the area was entirely rural, with villages at Earl's Court and Little Chelsea, and the intervening land occupied by market gardens, grassland and paddocks, although a gravel pit was recorded in the area in 1753. Indeed, the first train halt at Earl's Court was instituted in order to allow local farmers to load their produce onto the trains. The legacy of the areas market garden past continues to this day in Brompton Cemetery where, as it has remained an enclosed piece of land, asparagus and other food crops can occasionally be seen growing. As George Godwin, the architect of much of the redevelopment, recalled in 1875, "We remember an old friend who used to say the adjacent field [now Thistle Grove] was never without a hare and that he had out of the window counted six brace of partridge rise from the Boltons".

The redevelopment of some sixty acres stretching from Earl's Court Road area was undertaken by the famous West End confectioners, the Gunter Brothers. Most of the land in this area belonged to the Gunter family. James Gunter, the famous Berkeley Square confectioner, began buying land in the area in 1801 until his death in 1819. His son, Robert, began development in the 1840s. After Robert's death in 1852, his sons, Robert, born in 1831, and James, born in 1833, continued the expansion of the development into the Redcliffe Estate area.

Gunter Grove is named after them, while Edith Grove was named after Captain Robert Gunters daughter, Edith, who died of scarlet fever at the age of eight. Many of the family are buried in Brompton Cemetery.

The biography of Captain Robert Gunter shows how many of the local streets were named. After serving as a young officer in the Dragoon Guards in the Crimea, Robert Gunter settled in Yorkshire at Wetherby Grange in the village of Collingham, near Knaresborough. He married Miss Jane Benyon of Gledhow Hall, and was elected to parliament for the Barkston division of Yorkshire, and hunted with the Bramham Moor Hunt. The word Redcliffe is thought to have been used as George Godwin, the principal architect, had recently completed designing a church in the Redcliffe area of Bristol.

The layout of the roads on the Redcliffe Estate was submitted in 1864 by the builders William Corbett from London and Alexander McClymont, born in Scotland, to the Metropolitan Board of Works who approved them almost immediately. The building began in Cathcart Road in 1864. By 1882, of approximately 82 acres of the Redcliffe Estate, there has been built 11000 houses, three churches (St Luke, Redcliffe Gardens, St Mary, The Boltons and St Jude, Courtfield Gardens), approximately ninety mews properties and five public houses (the Finborough Arms, the Coleherne Arms, the Ifield Arms, the Redcliffe Arms and the Hollywood Arms). The majority of the buildings were constructed by Corbett and McClymont who, in 1878, were declared bankrupt with debts of 1.25 million pounds, a phenomenal sum for the period.

The architects for much of this development were the brothers George and Henry Godwin. George Godwin was the founder and editor of the leading architectural magazine of the time, The Builder. He is buried in Brompton Cemetery.

The Finborough Arms
The Finborough Arms was built by Corbett and McClymont in 1868 to designs by the Godwins. The original ground floor design featured three entrances to separate snuggeries (drinking rooms), intended to keep the various social classes separate. The new refurbishment of the Finborough restores the main entrance door to the original position, but does not discriminate as to who uses it! The first floor has over the years been a restaurant, a Masonic Lodge, a billiards hall and, from 1980, a theatre. As one might expect from a building more than 130 years old, resident staff have experienced a number of possibly ghostly happenings...

One of the Finborough Arms' most regular customers was sanitary pioneer Thomas Crapper (1836-1910). The manufacturer of sanitary goods and improver of the Water Waste Preventer (the syphon fitted in British cisterns) who promoted plumbed bathroom fittings and brought them out of the closet. He founded Thomas Crapper & Co. in 1861 who were based, successively, in Robert Street, Draycott Avenue and the King's Road, and the firm still exists today. He and his brother, George, would regularly begin their working day in the Finborough Arms with a bottle of champagne!

For details of some of the residents of the Finborough Arms, click here

Finborough Road
Finborough Road derives its name from the Pettiward family who also owned several properties in the local area. Finborough Hall in the village of Great Finborough, near Stowmarket, was their country seat in Suffolk.

The word Finborough is Anglo-Saxon, thought to have derived either from Fynbarow, meaning a burial barrow in the Fens, or fineborga, meaning Fenn as a marsh and Burgh or Borg as a small town, ie. the town of the Fen, or Fentown. More prosaically, the word Brompton is derived from Broom Farm.

Ifield Road
Ifield Road was originally known as Honey Lane, a name that still survives as the name of a building across the road from the Finborough Arms. The name Ifield comes from the village of Ifield in Sussex, probably because Corbett and McClymonts solictors brother was the vicar there. Until 1909, the section of Ifield Road north of Adrian Mews was known as Adrian Terrace. Ifield Road was, to some extent, the poor relation of the Redcliffe development in that it was the only street with predominantly working and lower middle class residents, possibly because the upper classes did not wish to live so close to the cemetery.

Ifield Road was the scene of a smallpox epidemic in 1881. The outbreak had important epidemiological consequences, due to the detailed case studies made under the direction of Thomas Orme Dudfield, Medical Officer for Kensington from 1871 to 1908, which went someway to proving that the spread of the disease was not caused by the proximity of the Fulham Smallpox Hospital, built in 1876-77.

The Local Area in Literature and Film
Samuel Beckett lived in the area for much of the 1930s,. and the area is referred to a great deal in his 1938 novel Murphy. It is at the lower end of Edith Grove that Murphy and his mistress Celia first met:

"It was on the street, the previous midsummer's night, the sun being then in the Crab, that she met Murphy. She had turned out of Edith Grove into Cremorne Road, intending to refresh herself with a smell of the Reach and then return by Lot's Road, when chancing to glance to her right she saw, motionless in the mouth of Stadium Street, considering alternately the sky and a sheet of paper, a man. Murphy."

Much of the movie An American Werewolf in London was filmed in the local area with The Princess Beatrice Hospital on the corner of Finborough Road and Old Brompton Road appearing as the hospital, while Redcliffe Square was used to film the metamophosis scene, and Jenny Agutter's flat was at No 66 Redcliffe Square.

In 2004, the Finborough Theatre commissioned a new play on the Finborough Road murder of 1922, Lullabies of Broadmoor by Steve Hennessy.

A Day in the Life by John Lennon and Paul McCartney from The Beatles 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was inspired by the death of Tara Browne, the heir to the Guinness fortune, and friend of the Beatles, who, on 18 December 1966, drove his Lotus Elan into the back of a parked lorry in Redcliffe Square. Browne was driving with his girlfriend, model Suki Poiter, through South Kensington in the early hours at high speed (some reports say in excess of 170 km/h). He ignored or failed to see a traffic light and proceeded through an intersection, colliding with a parked lorry. He was likely killed instantly. Poiter was not injured. John Lennon said: "I didn't copy the accident. Tara didn't blow his mind out. But it was in my mind when I was writing that verse. The details of the accident in the song — not noticing traffic lights and a crowd forming at the scene — were similarly part of the fiction."

“I read the news today oh boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
And though the news was rather sad
Well I just had to laugh
I saw the photograph.
He blew his mind out in a car
He didn't notice that the lights had changed
A crowd of people stood and stared
They'd seen his face before
Nobody was really sure
If he was from the House of Lords.”

Redcliffe Square is mentioned in A Fairly Honourable Defeat by Iris Murdoch (2001), A Second Legacy by Joanna Trollope and Dorian: An Imitationby Will Self (2004).

Redcliffe Gardens is mentioned in The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett by Compton Mackenzie (1918):

" So shall I. Here we are in Redcliffe Gardens. Damned big house and only myself
and my sister to live in it. Live there like two needles in a haystack. ..."

Novelist Arnold Bennett lived in the area in the 1890's and it is mentioned in many of his works - while his The Roll Call (1918) features Redcliffe Gardens and the Redcliffe Arms.