South Kensington Living
Gilston Road
Gilston Road runs north from Fulham Road into the Boltons.
The houses on the west side are mainly four-storeys (plus basement) and are semi detached. The houses on the east side are well set back from the road and have very large front gardens. Some are stucco and some brick above ground floor level. They are mainly semi detached and the houses at either end have small interesting towers.
The street has a lovely view of the church in The Boltons and is tree lined.
The houses are particularly outstanding.
Gilston Road is said to have taken its name from the Gunter family’s house in Breconshire. It was built in the first wave of house building on the Gunter’s estate which took place in the last years of Robert Gunter I’s lifetime as part of the development of the Boltons and surrounding streets including Milborne Grove Tregunter Road Harley Gardens and Priory Walk.
This street is unusual in that the sites were not allocated any one builder. This was very much a piecemeal development although the builders plans would have been subject to the approval of the Godwins, the Gunters’ surveyors.
One of the first houses to be built was No. 26 on the end of Priory Walk, which was constructed by Robert Trower in 1850-3. The rest of the east side of the road between Milborne Grove and Priory Walk was constructed between 1852 and 1854 by various builders. Thomas Eames built Nos. 14 and 16 in 1852 and Nos. 10 and 12, at the Milborne Grove end, in 1854. William Harding built Nos. 18-24, which was the rest of the range as far as Priory Walk, in 1852.
Thomas Eames’s No.10 and William Harding’s Nos 22 and 24 share a style said to be “Cheltenham-Swiss-Italianate”.
On the opposite side of the street, most of the houses were built in about 1852. Thomas Holmes built Nos. 9 and 11 at the Milborne Grove end. These were on James Gunter II’s land but the rest were on Robert Gunter II’s land. Holmes used a distinctive form of curved hood over segmental-headed window openings, also used by James Bonnin in Harley Gardens and Robert Trower in Priory Walk.
Nos. 13-19 were built by Charles Delay, Nos. 21-23 by a consortium of John Atkinson, Stephen Peirson and Daniel Tidey, and Nos. 25-35 by Stephen Peirson on his own.
The land on the Fulham Road end of Gilston Road was not owned by the Gunter family and work took place there much later. Benjamin and Thomas Bradley built Nos. 3, 3A, 5, 5A Gilston Road in 1871.
The houses were given balustraded garden walls and imposing rusticated gate-piers so that Gilston Road would be a suitable approach from Fulham Road to the centrepiece development of The Boltons.
The 1871 census tells us that on the chosen day, 27 houses had families in residence, and between them there were 94 family members and 53 servants. The heads of the households included two army officers, a boot maker, a stockbroker, merchants, surgeons, clergymen, architects, the secretary of a gold mining company, and an author and botanist.
