BUILT IN CHELSEA: Two Millennia of Architecture & Townscape

Chelsea has changed dramatically since Henry VIII would venture upstream to visit Sir Thomas More in his rural retreat. Henry's own Chelsea Manor House has long been demolished, but the waterside area retains something of its historic flavour, while Sloane Square and King's Road, developed as fashionable areas in the late 18th century, are still the centre of style and moneyed glamour. Christopher Wren's Royal Hospital, still home to the Chelsea Pensioners, is the central architectural glory of the whole estate. In 1712 Hans Sloane acquired the manor of Chelsea from Viscount Newhaven and started to develop Cheyne Row and the adjacent streets including Cheyne Walk, home to a galaxy of famous names including Dante Gabriel Rossetti with his menagerie at no 16, Vaughan Williams, Bertrand Russell, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, Swinburne, Lloyd George, Bram Stoker and Ronnie Wood. The author's detailed account of the Cheyne Walk development focuses on the scale and proportion of these elegant and individual houses. Rossetti's house, no 16, is assertively Baroque, with the pilasters culminating in a stone ogee moulding, and the canted bay window above the door forming the house's most striking feature. The rather grand Argyll House on King's Road is the subject of a 1930s painting by John Lavery, showing the interior decorator Sybil Colefax, who owned the house, standing on the white-painted stairs. Victorian Tite Street was laid out by the Metropolitan Board of Works when it was developing the Chelsea Embankment in the 1870s. Whistler was one of the first to snap up a lease, but his radically designed modernist studio was considered to lower the tone, not helped by his protracted lawsuit with Ruskin. Oscar Wilde was also associated with Tite Street, as was the painter John Singer Sargent, drawing crowds of aristocrats to his studio to have their portraits painted. Here are the hidden histories of architects, patrons and the diverse people who have made their lives in and around them from Chelsea Old Church through the churches, military establishments, theatres, restaurants, housing and shops. The modern Chelsea Society is the guardian of this rich architectural heritage. 16.5 x 23.5cm, 311pp, softback, hundreds of photos in black and white and colour.