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The Chelsea

setFrom its birth in Tudor

times to the raffish, bohemian era of the 1960s and right up to the present day, Clive

Aslet explores the people and places that have given Chelsea its

vibrant personality

Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull lived at 48, Cheyne Walk, which Mick bought for £50,000 in 1968. He still lives on Cheyne Walk, but in a house that cost £10 million in 2009

London is both old and ever- changing: historic streets constantly provide opportu-nities for new life. nowhere

is this truer than in Chelsea, whose intimate streets have, at different times, welcomed art, fashion and inter-national buyers. Although, as always happens, the artists became fewer as house prices rose, there remains an irrepressible spirit about it, attracting gardeners to the Chelsea Flower Show, connoisseurs to the Masterpiece art-and-antiques fair and shoppers in their thousands to the King’s Road.

Away from the hubbub, the volume drops to a whisper and you find your-self in some of the most romantic streets in London. Chelsea Pensioners are still seen in their scarlet coats. Listen and you’ll hear echoes of the Swinging Sixties, when Chelsea was synonymous with cool.

Like many of the old villages of London, Chelsea’s history began with the Thames. In the Tudor period, the river was the super highway along which the king was ostentatiously rowed in his barge, to the sound of trumpets, and his subjects made their more modest way in wherries. This attracted Sir Thomas More to

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Cadogan Gardens, to be landscaped by Holland’s father-in-law, Capability Brown.

As yet, the five fields that would become Belgravia had not been drained, so Sloane Street cut through an area that was still countrified. ‘If the weather permits, Eliza and I walk into London this morning,’ wrote Jane Austen, staying in Sloane Street with her brother Henry to correct proofs in 1811.

However, the feeling of the devel-opment was urban, the streets lined with terraces of houses for prosper-ous but not aristocratic families, in the yellow stock brick that has built so much of London. Most of them, as was usual, were rented.

A sign of Holland’s ambition was the house he built for himself, imme-diately south of Hans Place—indeed, arranged so that Hans Place was more or less its front garden. Alas, there is little evidence as to what it looked like. It stood, however, in 16 acres of garden and came to be known—pre-sumably as a cheeky nod to the Royal Pavilion—as the Pavilion. The build-ing of what was known as Hans Town

Left: Visitors from around the world flock to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show held at the home of the beloved Pensioners (see page 24)Above and right: Sir Hans Sloane over-sees Sloane Square

physician and made a fortune there, partly from plantations growing the tree from which quinine is extracted. on his return to London, he married an heiress and, in time, rose to be Queen Anne’s physician-extraordinary (and given that lady’s dire obstetrical history, she needed one), as well as President of the Royal Society.

Locally, the perpetuation of Sloane’s name remembers his role in Chelsea’s development. When he bought the manor in 1712, it consisted of little more than 11 dwellings and a farm of 166 acres. It cannot be said that Sloane himself did very much to develop it (although he will forever be remembered for giving the free-hold of the Physic Garden to the Society of Apothecaries at a pepper-corn rent in perpetuity).

However, it is through his daugh-ter’s marriage in 1717 to Charles, 2nd Baron Cadogan, a soldier who had recently been elected an MP, that Chel- sea passed into the family that would turn it from fields into the place we

know today, continuing (through the Cadogan Estate) to be the area’s larg-est landowner.

Chelsea had already enjoyed a flurry of architectural activity in about 1700 with the building of Cheyne Walk, named after William Lord Cheyne, who had owned Chelsea Manor before Sloane, but this was, in terms of scale, eclipsed by the events that followed 1777. That year, the young architect Henry Holland, virtually the house architect of the boisterous Whig aristo- crats who belonged to Brooks’s Club, approached the 3rd Baron (later 1st Earl) Cadogan about a strip of nursery gardens that he wanted to develop.

Agreement was reached and the principal thoroughfare and public space that arose were called respectively Sloane Street and Sloane Square. To the west of Sloane Street is a rectangle with the corners cut off—the first experiment in London with a geo-metrical layout that was not a square —which was named, once again, in honour of Sloane: Hans Place.

The scheme included a long garden along the east side of Sloane Street:

continued through the 1780s. Aus-ten was not the only artistic or literary personality to have been attracted to Chelsea. The composer Thomas Arne lived in the King’s Road and is thought to have composed Rule Britannia there in 1740. others came when the Queen Anne and Georgian houses fell out of fashion in the Vic-torian period and could be had on cheap rents—£30 a year, in the case of Thomas Carlyle when he and his wife came to Cheyne Row in 1834.

old and successful, J. W. M. Turner came to Cheyne Walk in the follow-ing decade, his mistress Sophia Booth putting her name to the lease. From 1862, dante Gabriel Rossetti followed his example, sharing 16, Cheyne Walk with peacocks, parrots, wombats and Algernon Swinburne. His housekeeper

build a house near what is now Beaufort Street in the 1520s. It was near enough to the centre of admin-istration at Whitehall, yet surrounded by gardens and orchards.

only a garden wall survives of that Chelsea home, although More himself is commemorated by a statue on Cheyne Walk. After More’s execution in 1534, the King built a house here: Chelsea Manor. It was a wedding present for his Queen, Katherine Parr. This structure has also been demolished, but provides the key to the area’s subsequent deve- lopment, as, in the reign of Charles II, it was acquired by Sir Hans Sloane.

Sloane is commemorated in a host of street names as well as a statue (a cast of the one now in the British Museum) in duke of York Square. In addition, his own can be seen outside Chelsea old Church: a stone urn beneath a stone canopy.

In part, these tributes celebrate a remarkable man. Having trained as a doctor, Sloane accompanied the duke of Albemarle to Jamaica as his

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was his former lover and former muse, Fanny Cornforth.

Then, Chelsea’s artistic reputation was sealed by James Mcneill Whistler, who not only lived here, painting noc-turnes of the river, but helped to found the Chelsea Arts Club, which continues to maintain a raffish pres-ence in old Church Street today.

The Victorians disliked Georgian architecture, finding it monotonous and cramped, so, as the original leases of Hans Town ended in the 1880s, streets were rebuilt on a bigger scale, in red brick with curly gables; details of glazed terracotta were derived from those that the architect Sir Ernest George had painted during his annual sketching holidays on the Continent. With his astute eye for architecture, Sir osbert Lancaster would later parody them as ‘Pont Street dutch’.

In the 20th century, Chelsea came into its own. Much of the excitement was focused on the King’s Road, the private thoroughfare by which mon-archs such as Charles II had reached Kew. Architectural highlights include the mansion built by Giacomo Leoni in 1723, now known as Argyll House (the 4th duke of Argyll lived here in

Clockwise from left: Dedicated followers of fashion in the Swinging Sixties; the Chelsea Arts Club has a riotous repu-tation; Mary Quant’s Bazaar was paradise for stylish shoppers; the King’s Road is still an epi-centre of elegance

by Feliks Topolski, celebrating the Chelsea Set. Topolski was a figure of his time, known for what the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes as ‘the free love affairs with women which were a currency of his milieu’. Painted in the quick-fire technique he perfected during magazine commissions and as a war artist, the portraits include aristo-crats, such as Lady Massereene and Ferrard and Lady Astor; glamorous cosmopolites such as Jacqueline Kennedy’s sister Princess Radziwill; figures from the Arts, including Van-essa Redgrave; and girls whom he’d taken a fancy to on the King’s Road.

The mixture sums up the times, in which the end of salon society collided with pop culture, in streets that—still sometimes rundown and cheap—could accommodate creative and original individuals and pioneer-ing boutiques (such as Mary Quant’s Bazaar at 138a), some of them short-lived, as well as John Le Carré’s fictional George Smiley.

the last two years of his life at the end of the 1760s) and Sir Christopher Wren’s Royal Avenue of 1682.

But, for the 1960s, it wasn’t build-ings, but people who mattered. That was just as well, because Chelsea, like the rest of London, was still recover-ing from the neglect occasioned by the Second World War. So bad was its condition that the planner Lionel Brett, Viscount Esher, proposed replacing the whole of Sloane Street with a series of tower blocks and concrete walkways.

This plan was defeated by the Chelsea Society, who argued that an ‘unrivalled feature of London and particularly Chelsea is the high intel-lect level of the resident communities and their contribution to world pro-gress in every field beneficial to mankind’.

In the end, Modernism could only rear its head in the Carlton Tower Hotel, opened in 1961, the first high-rise hotel in London. The owner was American and the Rib Room offered thick slices of beef: it was in this res-taurant that the young satirist david Frost chose to be interviewed and it remained a favourite haunt until the end of his life.

The hotel continues to evoke the 1960s through a series of paintings

Since then, London has gone upmarket and Sloane Street, once workaday, is now home to premier brands such as Chanel and dolce & Gabbana. Property is now far more expensive than it was 60 years ago, but, then, the Arts have experienced the same kind of inflation, so Sir Mick Jagger still has a house on Cheyne Walk, along with the hotelier Sir Rocco Forte, Pavlos, Crown Prince of Greece, husband and wife Gerald Scarfe and Jane Asher and Sally Greene, owner of the old Vic.

Roman Abramovich has to live in Chelsea, perhaps (he owns the football club); he and other over- seas buyers blend into a scene in which 60% of purchasers come from abroad, according to Andy Buchanan of John d. Wood.

decades of careful planning and investment by the Cadogan Estate, combined with a general rise in prop-erty values, have given Chelsea a new face and its personality is as vibrant as ever.

Later Life, 2016 11