South Kensington Living
Foulis Terrace
Foulis Terrace is a short road running from Fulham Road to Onslow Gardens.
The east side consists of four-storey red-brick houses built recently.
The west side consists of a terrace of four and five-storey (plus basement) white stucco houses.
Brompton Hospital was built in the 1840s. The hospital trustees bought most of the land from the Smiths Charity Estate on the north side of Fulham Road. In 1852 the land immediately to the west came up for sale, when the Harrington-Villars Estate, of which it formed part, was partitioned. The hospital ultimately bought this additional land. Part of it was applied to extending the garden of the hospital but the rest was set aside to be used for speculative building.
In 1853 the hospital’s surveyor, George Pownall, entered into an agreement with Charles Delay, a builder from Buckingham Palace Road, to develop the site.
Foulis Terrace was one of the streets to be constructed. It was named after the Reverend Sir Henry Foulis who has a major involvement in the setting up of the hospital and who paid for the construction of St Luke’s Chapel, which adjoins the hospital (built in 1849-50).
Delay’s first step was to build ‘The Rose’ public house on the Fulham Road corner. He then moved in as landlord and thereafter combined building and running his pub. Although he began construction work, he went mad in 1856 and was put in a lunatic asylum in Bow, where he died a year later. His widow, Ellen Delay carried on with the contract. She had difficulty selling the houses which had already been built in Foulis Terrace and blamed it on the fact that prospective occupiers had to watch patients in the hospital walking up and down smoking and spitting in the garden opposite. Eventually the hospital moved the male patients to the other wing and brought female patients to the wing opposite Foulis Terrace, since they were expected to have better manners. The houses were eventually all sold or let by 1860.
There are 14 houses. They have four main storeys and the design style is Italianate. The porches have Doric columns. There are balconies at first floor level with iron railings similar to those on the adjoining Smith Charity Estate.
