South Kensington Living
Cranley Place
Cranley Place is a short stretch of houses, built with the same yellowish brick as Onslow Gardens, rather than the blacker brick of neighbouring Onslow Square.
The houses have three main storeys, plus a basement and an attic floor. (The dormer windows in the mansard roof are barely visible.) The centre houses have gabled roofs with higher windows. There is a prominent decorative cornice at along the top of wall, decorated with dentils.
Unlike the houses in Onslow Gardens and Onslow Square, which all front straight onto the street, all the Cranley Place houses have a small garden about six feet deep in front of the area and the main door. Most are paved over.
The doors themselves are surrounded by porches with Corinthian columns. At first floor level, cantilevered balconies run the length of the terrace.
They have iron railings, widening over the balconies.
There are three windows per house. The central window has a pediment. Each has a hood with a moulded bracket.
The land on which Cranley Place and other streets were eventually built was a rare new acquisition by the trustees of Henry Smith’s Charity.
In 1852 the Smith's Charity bought the acres which separated the Smith’s Charity’s developed estate in the east from its remaining undeveloped land to the west, called Brompton Heath, which was mainly occupied as market gardens and nurseries. This land had been part of the Harrington-Villars estate. When the estate was divided up in 1850-1, this land was put up for sale. For some reason the Smith's Charity trustees did not obtain it, and it was bought by the Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851. But perhaps the Commissioners were playing a canny game because Smith’s Charity owned a strategic piece of land the Commissioners badly needed in order to complete their rectangle of museums between Queen’s Gate, Kensington Road, Exhibition Road and Cromwell Road. The two pieces of land were exchanged and this provided the land for the further expansion of development west. For the full story, read the history of the Harrington-Villars estate
The west side of Cranley Place was part of the new development. Freake’s firm began work on Cranley Place in 1863 or 1864 and it was completed by 1867.
