South Kensington Living
Alexander Estate
This estate originated with Sir William Blake, who had a wine business in the City. He bought land in the Kensington area. When he died in 1645 the land which would become the Alexander Estate passed to his son William. It passed to his son, Christopher, who left it to his sister, Mary Dorney and the children of her first marriage.
Eventually it was inherited in the early 1700s by her grand-daughter Anna Maria Harris. She married John Browne, but he died in 1711 and in 1713 she married John Thurloe Brace. Their only son, Harris Thurloe Brace, a Dragoon Guard officer, inherited the land in 1760 on the death of his mother. When he died unmarried in 1799 he left it to John Alexander, a 37 year old lawyer in Bedford Row. From then on it was known as the Alexander Estate. Brace was being very correct in giving the land to Alexander. John Alexander was Brace's mother's (Anna Maria Harris's) great-grandson by her first marriage to John Browne.
John Alexander planned Alexander Square, but died in 1831 before work could commence. He in turn left the estate to his son, Henry Browne Alexander, who was also a lawyer. H B Alexander was responsible for most of the development of the estate during his long ownership which lasted till his death in 1885.
The estate passed to his son, also a lawyer, named William Henry Alexander, whose claim to fame is that he paid for the construction of the National Portrait Gallery off Trafalgar Square. When he died in 1905 the estate passed to Lady George Campbell, the wife of the Duke of Argyll who was a grand-daughter of John Alexander's brother, James. When She died in 1947, she left the estate to her daughter, Joan Campbell. On her death in 1960 the estate passed into a trust, initially for the benefit of Ian Anstruther, a grandson of Lloyd George.
The Alexander estate is also known as ‘the Thurloe Estate’ and many roads bear that name. The myth put about in the 19th century was that the estate had originally been given by Oliver Cromwell to John Thurloe, a prominent Puritan politician of the Civil War period. In fact, as above, the only ‘Thurloe’ connection was that the famous Puritan’s grandson married Anna Maria Harris in 1713 (long after the Civil War period of the mid-1600s).
