Kensington Gore – hot and cold and nine miles from Hounslow

Lowther Lodge, is a lovely GII* red brick building at 1 Kensington Gore, facing Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens as seen here. The house was built in the 1870s for William Lowther, MP, designed by architect Richard Norman Shaw who is also responsible for the Bedford Park Estate adjacent to Turnham Green. 

In 1912, Lowther Lodge was sold to the Royal Geographical Society and, over subsequent decades, the property was extended to include a library, a lecture theatre, offices and other facilities. One distinctive addition is the hall/meeting room at the junction with the Exhibition Road which is adorned with many things that please me – a distance marker, a bench mark, two statues and some street names.  

First, the white metal sign, dated 1911, showing the distances East to Hyde Park Corner and West to Hounslow. This has always intrigued me because I doubted that Hyde Park was a full mile away, but having now checked using my trusty string and wall map I can confirm it as a fact. Similarly, the marker that sits further up the road outside The Milestone Hotel is definitely half a mile away. 

This heavy metal information post is quite amusing as regards its details which have been crudely enhanced in black paint, making the lion and the unicorn appear as comedy cartoon characters and the manicules look more like random blobs rather than elegant pointing hands.

Marks on the bricks indicate that it used to be attached to the wall. Indeed, the oblique view confirms that there is a 4"/10cm gap. 

To the right of the mile-marker (surely it's not a milestone if it's not made of stone?) there is a little vertical rectangle of verdigri'd metal. Look closely and see "OS, BM, 0931, S" and a 3-line motif:

This is an Ordinance Survey Bench Mark used by surveyors to calculate heights above sea level. More about these here. 

On the other side of the mile-marker there looms a marvellous statue of David Livingstone, explorer, missionary, writer and medic:

This is the work of Thomas Bayliss Huxley-Jones, a prolific and popular artist whose work adorns many public places in London, including the Joy of Life fountain across the road within Hyde Park. 

Mr Livingstone was unveiled on 23rd October 1953. It 'pairs' with the earlier statue of Sir Ernest Shackleton that was installed in 1932 on the East side of the building in Exhibition Road: 

Shackleton, complete with thick fluffy boots and mittens, is the work of Charles Sarjeant Jagger whose most famous work is probably the Royal Artillery Memorial (1935) at Hyde Park Corner (which we know is one mile away!).

Finally, the lovely carved street signs – I wonder if these also came from Jagger's studio:

I'm told that London cabbies call this location 'Hot & Cold' due to the climates that these two intrepid gentlemen explored..!

Kensington Coal Hole Cover Plates – Farmer, Pearson, Bartle and Bird

I recently wrote about the lovely things to be found along the streets to the east of Gloucester Road and mentioned that I'd spotted quite a lot of attractive coal hole cover plates along the way. Quite a few bore the name Haywards, a company that became one of the largest suppliers of this kind of thing, others plates bore names which provoke further investigation. 

This first of these is Bartle & Co. Two examples shown here cut into into a slabs of York Stone. There are two different patents visible. 

Patent 1:  The example above left is in Cornwall Gardens. The outer ring/casing is made by Hayward Bros of Southwark and includes instructions how to install the fixture:"This ring to be fixed with Portland cement / For Haywards Patent Plate 12" – this indicates that Haywards intended that one of their own lids should be to be dropped into this space., however, with about 98% of cover plates being of the 12" variety, it's fair to say one size [almost] fits all. although whenever I have found these outer rings visible they usually bear the Haywards* name.  But the instructions are not meant to be visible – as per the instructions, the outer recessed lip should be covered by cement to hold it in place, as shown by the pic on the right; a messy example I spotted in nearby Lexham Gardens. 

Patent 2: These two covers advertise James Bartle's Western Ironworks in Notting Hill and are interesting because they also include "Bird's patent self-fastening plate" – something I have seen before but not really thought about or addressed until now. Who was Mr Bird? Perhaps he worked for the Bartle family and had another job making custard?! Having just 'wasted' 20 mins on this in a futile online searches and found nothing but observations, I am going to have to shelve this research for another day – please do let me know if you can shed any light on Mr Bird.

Another Notting Hill company also prevalent within the posh streets of South Kensington is R. H. & J. Pearson Ltd:

Pearsons also implemented circles within their anti-slip designs, varying the amount of circles from five to seven. I believe the one shown above left is the more recent of the two – it advertises the company's 'Patent Automatic Action' – a different way of saying 'self-locking' as seen on other makers' plates – after the coal was poured into the bunker below the plate was dropped back into the hole and it triggered a catch which immediately locked it, negating the need for additional human interaction below.  The pretty plate on the right sports ventilation holes allowing air to circulate within the storage space. 

More circles near Cornwall Gardens. Two very simple designs:

The self-locking plate on the left sports raised dots as additional non-slip device and appears to have travelled all the way from Stockport!  Mikey Ashworth has shared some marvellous info about John Needham & Sons here. The one on the right bears no maker's name but includes glass inserts to allow light into the bunker, as also seen here in another Bartle plate:

I like these two because it shows how one design can be adapted as solid metal or with glass inserts which, I assume, are prisms or cones that spread/reflect the light rather than just direct it straight downwards. 

Finally, these two – an almost smooth plate set within an octagon surround and a plate bearing the name of Farmer, a local comapny. 

I have only ever spotted one other housing with eight sides and it's in Marylebone, near Regents Park. Neither appear to have ever been branded with a maker's name. The Farmer Brothers plate in Drayton Gardens shown above is actually sited a stone's throw from the company's shop – and they are still trading today, but I can't seem to link to their website. I have not discovered any other Farmer Bros plates, but surely there must be, especially in this area of London, this being the local hardware store. 

I now now realise that this last pair of pics makes the one of the left look like a diddy little hexagonal plug point next to a manhole cover! All the pics here are just snaps taken on the day – I haven't shown them in proportion.  FYI, the standard size cover for a cover plate (the central removable bit) = 12"/30cm diameter and I've just recalled that one of them was [unusually] slightly larger than the standard size – I think it was probably the older Pearson one with the ventilation holes. 

There are lots more similar posts about coal holes on his site – please use the search box at top right  on the web version.

*If you are interested in finding out more about Hayward Bros, a fascinating company, why not join me for my Southwark Ghostsigns guided walk.   

The Portland stone façade of Joseph Emberton's magnificent 1929 building at Olympia is slathered in paint

Going past Olympia on the top deck of a bus from Hammersmith to high Street Kensington earlier this week, it meant I had a good view of the works there. I was really keen to see the recently uncovered Grade II listed Art Deco era façade, that has for at least two years been covered in scaffolding and protective cloth and supported by scaffold. 

The first pic below shows it in 2016 and the second two are from 2002. All three are screen grabs from Google Streetview:

From my seat I could see that the whole façade has been slathered in a continuous sheet of white paint and there are already dirty marks on it, mostly near ventilation pipes:  

I pondered why the developers would be so daft as to paint over beautiful Portland stone.  Also, the windows looked different to me (were they grey before?) and the panels of horizontal bars also looked odd. 

Ah, but no, well, sort of... it turns out that my memory is playing games with me. 

When I got home I dug out a pic of how it this part of the exhibition complex looked when it was first completed. Being as the building has been covered for so long it appears I have sort of forgotten what it looked like in recent years and, instead, it is this next pic that I have in my mind's eye because I show it to people on my guided walk around the area. It shows that the façade in 1930. It was stone clad, the windows were not so obvious and those horizontal metal we see today bars weren't part of Emberton's original design.

I was going to start ranting on about how daft it is to cover the Portland Stone, but having checked previous years via google Streetview and zooming in for a closer peek, I can clearly see that it's been slathered in paint for at least 15 years. 

For instance, his is the building in 2014, which also shows that extra row of windows and rows of horizontal and vertical bars used to attaching signs for the events within:

All this paint has meant regular upkeep, as here in 2012:

The rant didn't happen. I have no finger to point being as the 'damage' happened decades ago. Though, it would have been nicer if they had cleaned off all that paint and return to the beauty of the Portland stone rather than slap on another layer.

There are some really interesting things happening with this site and I am looking forward to seeing how the whole complex will look when it's finished. Why not join me for a guided walk...?

Ding Dong Doorways and Doulton – Delightful Distractions in Kensington

I went to the The Design Centre on yesterday afternoon. I like it there. But this time, my enjoyment was spoiled by screaming kids at every turn, meaning I couldn't hear myself read. Yeah yeah, I know it's school holidays, but some parents were allowing their sprogs to charge about the place like it was a playground, treating the exhibits as interactive toys. A small Habitat pod exhibition on the ground floor contains a bed with a duvet. I tried to read the the info board in there whilst two adults stood and waited as their charges had a pillow fight and screamed at high pitch. I fear this is what the Museum of London will become. Sorry, I mean The London Museum, henceforth to be known as 'The House of Splat'. 

I gave up and headed out into Kensington High Street and investigated the nearby charity shops* before deciding to wander the streets that form the lower part of my Agatha Christie walking tour. I made my way down to Marloes Rd, passing the revamped St Mary's Hospital site, and turned left into Lexham Gardens. At the far corner there is a passageway leading to Cornwall Gardens.

There is a tree at the centre of this path that has the most enormous leaves, bigger than your head. I can't now recall the name, and I'm pretty sure it's not an indigenous species, but the leaves look gorgeous in the Autumn when they turn marvellous shades of pink, orange and yellow. I continued into Cornwall Gardens and headed south via Grenville Place, looking left and right at the mews. 

Then across Cromwell Road and directly into Ashburn Place with The Millennium Hotel ahead on the left. As I passed the side of the wall I noticed what looks like a face in the render:

Surely this is no accident?!  I had hoped that retrospective Google Streetview of this wall might show what this was, but I can find nothing on there. Perhaps this was a bit of street art/graffiti that was swiftly overpainted by the hotel...?

I turned right into Harrington Gardens. This wasn't my intended route, but this road serves me something new every time I walk along it. I managed to keep my phone in my pocket until the end of the end of the road when I noticed that the houses along the south side seem to have all had some kind competition 'my tiled threshold is better than yours' thing. Each one spectacularly different to the next and all splendid in their own way.

Most are small tiles but one of them sports slices of grey marble.
They also boast some excellent coloured glass in the porches. 

Round the corner, the first/corner house in Collingham Gdns has a lovely symmetrical mosaic pattern.

Turning southwards, I nipped briefly into Wetherby Gdns when I spotted the ghosts of the original doorbells in a gatepost. 

Collingham Gardens becomes Bolton Gardens and here I noticed something I've not seen on houses anywhere else – there are fancy metal ventilation grilles on the ground floor adjacent to the front doors. The second pic is one of a few Thomas Crapper manhole cover plates that I spotted along the way, this one is in Cresswell Place: 

I continued my detour and took a wander around The Boltons, a sort of elliptical shaped arrangement of large houses surrounding a church and private gardens. I counted twelve large vehicles idling with chauffeurs within, and about about the same number of drivers standing or leaning by gates waiting for moneyed clients to exit these large properties. It's all very sterile. Exacerbated by these houses all being painted exactly the same shade of bright dazzling white, which, to my eye, looks completely wrong, and fake. I dread to think what the insides of these houses look like as I very much doubt any of them retain much of their original C19th features. I think I'd be gutted, just like the interiors.

I turned into Priory Walk. There are two properties along here which sport 'Ancient Lights' signs. This tells us that c1870s this area, being ripe for property development, was a cause for planning concern and we might well have had taller blocks on narrower streets. 

One sign is high up on the back of 5 Harley Gdns, the other is a street level adjacent to the side entrance of 86 Drayon Gardens. (possibly the lowest sign of this type?):

Staying in Drayton Gardens there are  a couple of lovely mosaic thresholds. The one at No.90 is HUGE, flanked by beautiful fired tiles on the walls on the porch, and the other is chequered:

Enough. I was hungry. I headed back to Brompton Rd to get a bus to Sth Ken tube station but got distracted by the blue Doulton tiles on The Duke of Clarence. I should have taken a pic of the whole building because I hadn't realised until now that it has only recently been restored – see here to see how the pub used to look when it was slathered in paint. Hurrah!

The delightful Dove Mews behind the pub was yet another, albeit short detour, and then, as I waited for a bus on Old Brompton Rd, I noticed an old hand-painted street name peeping out from underneath the metal one near the corner with Creswell Gardens. It shows how it used to be called Moreton Terrace. 

What I haven't mentioned or shown here are all the lovely coal hole cover plates that I 'collected' along the way. I'll write up separately. Try not to get too excited... LOL!

*In Oxfam I had found and purchased a book about arsenic poisoning – 'The Inheritor's Powder' by Sandra Hempel.  I used to occasionally work with Sandra when I freelanced for publishing houses. I haven't seen here for +15 years and had no idea she'd written any books. I started it on the way home last night and continued it today, such that I have read the whole thing already. It's fascinating and engaging. 

Kensington Coal Holes in the Rain

I was out for a wander on Saturday and happened to be following the Long Water from the Italian Gardens to the Serpentine Gallery via the Peter Pan statue. It started to rain so I tied back my hair and buttoned up my mac and headed into the streets behind Kensington Gore as it occurred to me that I'd never properly explored that zone. 

Well, what a delight. Embassies and empty houses, cul-de-sacs, courtyards, mews and gardens, and hardly a human in sight. And I'm sure that wasn't due to the inclement weather on that day. I kept noticing how lovely some of the coal cover plates looked, highlighted by the rain. 

I turned into Palace Gate and noticed some ironmongers' designs that were new to me so, of course, I had to start taking snaps. If you notice any strange rainbow effects in these images it is the reflection of my colourful stripy umbrella!

First, above, two covers from distant locations – Lely's of Station Approach, London Bridge, with its four circular lenses sparkling in the rain, and a Luxfer Prisms of Clerkenwell cover, its centre section in-filled with cement. 

Then, on the West side of the street, I found a very unusual nobbly self-locking plate, here contrasted with one of its neighbours, in the conventional flatter style, here made by Needham & Sons. I am at a loss where or who Stockport John is/was.

I turned into Kensington Gate, a lovely enclosed street with private gardens, and along its northern side I found lots of what I can only call 'pretty' plates. It's as if someone had filled or coloured in the holes within the discs. Or perhaps it was just the water highlighting their features: 

These are two almost identical Hayward's plates, yet the left one looks to have marble inserts in some of the holes, and the one on the right contains a variety of coloured mosses, making it looked like an artist's palette. 

A James Bartle & Co plate further along looks like someone has been busy with a gold pen. And the holes in an adjacent Woodrow plate are filled with seeds etc, making it look like a little biology collection:

 

Then two unbranded plates, each with four lightwells/lenses but clearly (opaquely?!) using different grades of glass as one is more blue than green:

And here's another self-locking plate with little samples of grass within it alongside an earlier James Bartle design sporting five concentric circles:

Along the southern side of Kensington Gate I found some makers' names new to me including J. W. Benney & Co of Stepney in the East End (pic not included here because the photo's not very good) and two plates bearing the name of a local company J.W. Lawson of Kensington:

Both are floral, but I particularly like the unusual design on the one on the left. The one on the right shows a High Street Kensington address – a quick peek into the 1882 directory shows the business at No.108 as John Welch Lawson, builders' ironmonger which is directly opposite the tube station and it may well have been inside this building. 

I hope you enjoyed looking at these as much as I did finding them. There are lots more streets I haven't investigated in this area of Kensington, so I am pretty sure there are more architectural gems to be found there.

To see more of my coal hole observations, click here. 

Kensington Palace – what a revelation

Why oh why had I never been in here before. What a lovely surprise.
It's always the way, isn't it? you live in a city and take it for granted saying that next week you'll go and see what these bloody tourists are all looking at, and the day never comes.
Well, I finally went inside and it's bloody marvellous.
Kensington palace is sort of split into three historical periods. And, by chance we viewed it in, what we now believe in hindsight to be, the right order...
Actually this is a bit silly me posting about this and showing you pictures because I think the reason I loved it there so much is because I had no preconceptions whatsoever.
Oh well... sorry... here goes...

First we admired some of Queen Elizabeth II's frocks. She was tiny!!
The simple elegance of these dresses compared to the ones particularly worn by Diana Princess of Wales on display in another room was quite a shock. The 80s has a lot to answer for fashionwise; padded shoulders, puffball skirts, off the shoulder asymmetric concoctions, dropped waistlines, electric blue, gaudy green, hideous fabrics etc. 

Next to the Queens apartments. Simple and functional and homely.
Then... crash bang wallop!!! into the Kings Apartments – trompe l'oeil agogo!!!
Shown here is the famed staircase (the Queen's one has plain wooden panelling on the walls).  

Almost every room had a splendiferous ceiling and faux columns on the walls.
I caught Malcolm sitting on the throne.  

I was impressed that the information was given not on the standard boards but could be found subtly placed on relevant items within each room such as on fire screens, or on the excellent clothing recreated by the palace's design department sewn using a waterproof paper that beautifully imitates soft material.
Also, there was interactive lighting, sounds and music which occurred intermittently. In one room some dancers could be heard tapping the floorboards as their 'shadows' appeared on the wall. Delightful.

And lots of paintings, some large and fruity and others pocket-sixed and exquisite.
We played tried out some old dice and card games.  

Getting dressed back then wasn't a quick lick and a promise and sling on a onesie to pop out for a pint of milk. Those enormous dresses were as wide as a double bed and took hours to put on and take off, requiring helpers in order to be tied into the things. The second pic shows the uncomfortable under-structure that must have caused all sorts of wear and tear to the hips. What a painful palaver.
The third and fourth pic were taken in the Kings Gallery which is the only one of his rooms that bears any resemblance to the Queen's equivalent (see above left) – though, note the ceiling. 

We spotted a beautifully carved bust of a black slave. Wrong. Totally wrong. But how can you not admire the workmanship using different stones for different elements?
Time was running out and the palace staff (all absolutely lovely by the way and obviously happy to be working there) were ushering us out of the building closing doors behind us. So we whizzed through the Victorian wing vowing to come back soon so I only managed to snap a couple of pics of the The Great Exhibition Hall before exiting through the gift shop.
In the gardens outside I was a bit upset by the message being sent out by the topiary.
How jolly rude!