South Kensington Living
Crescent Place.
Crescent Place. Only one terrace (comprising Nos. 1A and 1-8 Crescent Place) now remains.
The houses are double-fronted. There are two floors and a basements, and there are two main rooms on each floor, with small extensions at the back.
The façades of the houses are bare brick, except for No. 1A which is stuccoed.
In about 1795 Michael Novosielski began the development of housing on the Smith’s Charity estate by building terraces of housing in new streets which he called Michael’s Grove and Michael’s Place. At the south end of Yeoman’s Row, Novosielski built himself a very grand mansion called Brompton Grange. In 1843 the trustees of the Smith’s Charity recovered possession of Brompton Grange when its lessee, a well known singer called John Braham, fell into financial difficulties which forced him to give up the mansion and its extensive grounds. The trustees decided to demolish it and use the six acres which the house and its grounds covered to build new houses.
James Bonnin had recently carried out the successful construction of Pelham Crescent and Pelham Place. So on 25 July 1843 the trustees entered into a new building agreement with him for the development of the Brompton Grange land. Under the agreement the trustees were to grant Bonnin or his nominees leases for eighty four years calculated from mid-summer’s day 1843. The ground rent was to be £250 a year (which is what Braham had been paying for Brompton Grange) but it would only rise to that after five years, to allow Bonnin time to construct and let the houses.
Thirteen cottage-style houses with stables were built in Crescent Place. They were all occupied by 1848. They were not intended for the usual well-heeled Brompton resident. They were constructed as kind of buffer between the houses in Egerton Crescent and any undesirables who might take houses just over the boarder of the Smith’s Charity estate in barbarous Chelsea.
As the trustees recorded, the houses were meant to be “a screen from any more unsightly buildings yards or gardens on land not belonging to the said Trustees”. In fact, the trustees had such low expectations even of the occupiers of their buffer zone that the occupants were made to agree specifically not to hang washing outside, or keep pigs and dogs in front of the houses, or use the houses for any trade or business. Lunatic asylums and brothels were such a fear that they were specifically prohibited.
Another reason for building such houses was to accommodate the considerable number of people needed to serve the well-to-do residents of the big houses. In 1851 the twelve houses in Crescent Place which were occupied by then contained 105 residents. It was quite common for there to be three families to a house. Some of the occupations are recorded in census returns. They included married out-servants, odd-job builders, tailors, dressmakers, milliners, and a shoemaker. (He lived there with his wife and eight children!) There was even a cow keeper, a dairyman and two milkmen. There must have been an exemption from the ban on trading from the premises to accommodate the dairyman and the shoemaker.
The trustees were apparently ambivalent about whether to allow in such working class people at all. Reginald Bray, the Charity’s treasurer and solicitor, is recorded as saying: “Crescent Place was built against my wish.”
Ten houses in Crescent Place were leased to Benjamin Watts, who was quite a large-scale builder himself. It is not known if he played any part in their construction. This indicates that he probably provided building finance. The financier would take the head lease and sub-let the house to a builder at an improved ground rents. He may have entered into such an arrangement with Bonnin. In about 1850 Watts signed a building agreement with the Charity’s trustees to build two houses in Yeoman’s Row (and Nos. 39 and 41 Egerton Terrace). Two houses in Crescent Place were later leased to Benjamin Watts junior, who kept the Admiral Keppel public house in Fulham Road.
Only Nos. 1A and 1-8 now survive. They are double-fronted houses with two main storeys and a basement and two rooms per floor. No. 1A is stuccoed; the rest are brick-faced. Most of them also have small closet wings at the rear.
