Earls Terrace is a terrace of twenty-five houses built in the first decade of the 19th century.
Worth observing that the Georgians called a spade a spade, in this instance a terrace a terrace. The Victorians were less accurate in their nomenclature. Margravine Gardens have no gardens to speak of; small back gardens backing onto the tube lines with room for a privy, not what one might hope for when promised gardens. Earls Terrace lies on the north side of Edwardes Square and has a well maintained strip of trees and garden protecting it from the noise and pollution of Kensington High Street and with an underground car park beneath it. On the south side of the terrace is a communal garden.
It is a picture perfect Georgian terrace – numbers one and twenty-five at either end are flats but from two to twenty-four are houses. Georgian houses in Islington and Canonbury are sometimes a bit shabby but this is Kensington and it looks it. It is immaculate because it was completely rebuilt in 1999, when the underground car park was created, but has retained its Grade II Listed status. The properties are not cheap: flats go for almost a million and houses closes to ten million.
In the sixties it was more Bohemian with links to the stage. Peter and Anthony Shaffer (their father apparently owned numbers 12 – 24) and Ian McKellen lived here as did Madonna in recent times. In the 19th century “Thomas Daniell (1749–1840), English landscape painter, lived and died at Number Fourteen” (Wikipedia).
Wikipedia is not clear. Thomas Daniell was English and a landscape painter but he did most of work in India. He started exhibiting at the Royal Academy when he was twenty-three but found it hard to make his name in England, travelling to Calcutta in 1784.
Over the next seven years he toured India executing attractive hand-painted aquatints. On his return to London he published them in six volumes titled Oriental Scenery.
This is a typical example of his work. The composition has all the charm and detail of an English landscape but with oriental exoticism instead of an English country house set in parkland. I like it so much that I bought this high quality reproduction from a company specialising in this sort of thing in the south of Austria: Meisterdrucke. They will print reproductions on canvas if desired but I chose museum quality paper and it was delivered in a stout tube this week, ready for framing at Canford & Co on the Lillie Road.
At the end 1805, beginning of 1806, Earls Terrace and Edwardes Square were due to be requisitioned to billet the marshals and generals of the victorious Armee d’Angleterre. I think safety and proximity to Kensington Palace, where the Emperor might have resided, were influencing factors. This choice probably made by one of the invasion planners who had been the French military attache in London in the period 1792-94 (safety abroad!), and would have been familiar with London.
Thank you for the recommendation of Meisterdrucke. Looks wonderful!
The actor Peter Wyngarde, better known as the super-suave TV character Jason King, lived in one of the flats from 1950 till his death in 2018. Alan Bates shared the flat with him for a period. There was a wonderful reflexologist in the flat below.
JK Rowling owned one of the refurbished houses for a period.