DAVID TUCKER
Kensington takes some getting to know. Not least because time in Kensington is multi-dimensional. A case in point: there’s an ‘ordinary’, nondescript corner of the village where you’ve got half a millennium of Kensington in the palm of your hand. You can peel the centuries off like the layers of an onion. It’s the corner of Thackeray Street and Ansdell Street. And for those who know, Thackeray Street is the true high street of the village. Forget High Street Kensington. Short, sweet little Thackeray Street is the real deal.
Kensington’s ‘Big Six’
IN THACKERAY STREET you’ve got three art galleries; you’ve got Riders & Squires (where you get outfitted for a spot of polo); you’ve got a very swish French patisserie; you’ve got the mosaic shop whose other ‘branch’ is in Paris … well, you get the idea.
Three art galleries, Riders & Squires, etc. – and all of them balanced, as it were, on a fulcrum of five centuries. To your right, along Thackeray Street (if you’re looking down Ansdell Street), there’s Kensington Square with its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses. To your left, a nineteenth-century mews. Just along Ansdell Street, on the left-hand side, twentieth-century institutional. But that purpose-built American university classroom building isn’t the whole story. Take a good look at Ansdell Street itself – notice how it meanders. What that arthritic ‘layout’ reflects is a seventeenth-century lane that led round behind the square to stabling and a bowling green. So: seventeenth century, eighteenth century, nineteenth century, twentieth century. And yes, that’s only four. You complete the straight by popping into one of the ‘shops’ I didn’t mention: Ottoemezzo, the little Italian deli. It magics up the best toasted sandwiches this side of Tuscany – ask for the ‘Fellini’ – and they’re served up by the prettiest Bulgarian girls in London. And you don’t get more twenty-first-century London than that!
And that’s just a quick flex of the centuries. What really matters is what’s inside that arc of time. Which is this: Kensington’s all about hidden places and ‘enclosures’; about wealth; about greenery and a certain rural character; about the court (this neighbourhood’s known as ‘the old court suburb’); about wondrous strange ‘outsiders’; about – yes – horses. Those factors are the Kensington ‘Big Six’. They’re the keys to its character – and its history. And they’re all here, all pivoting round this ordinary nondescript corner.
WHERE TO READ THIS
Either the very swish little French café or the little Italian deli referred to in this chapter. The Montparnasse is at 22 Thackeray Street; Ottoemezzo is at 6A Thackeray Street. Alternatively, pull up a cushion on the low garden wall in front of Hornets, the tiny – and wonderful – little vintage menswear shop in Kensington Church Walk. Be sure to say hello to Bill and Orlando, da man and da capo at Hornets (the cushions are courtesy of B and O).
You’ve got greenery, of course, in Kensington Square. But also – near the opposite corner of the square and up about a hundred feet (that’s up in the air, straight up in the air) – the Garden in the Sky. It’s the Derry & Toms Roof Garden, the largest and most astonishing roof garden in the world. Well, three gardens really: a Spanish Garden, a Tudor Garden and an English woodland (complete, like every English woodland, with a stream, a Japanese footbridge and pink Chilean flamingos). It runs to an acre and a half and rejoices in over 1,500 plants and shrubs, including the best roses in Europe (the horticultural secret for that being altitude: at a hundred feet up the Roof Garden’s well into the aphid’s death zone!).
And as for wealth, well, have a look at Kensington Court Place at the opposite end of Thackeray Street. Its charming little terraced cottages were originally built to house some of the ‘domestics’ attached to Kensington Palace (the ‘court’ we mentioned): in recent times one of them – at eight rooms they’re not big houses – fetched £1.5 million. Unmodernised.
The mews in the area tell the story of wealth and of horses. Wealth and horses went together like … well, like a horse and carriage. And Kensington’s awash with mews. Indeed, the prettiest and most unusual mews in London – and London has some 250 of them – are in Kensington. For sheer, rustic, rose-petal-perfect-pretty you want Kynance Mews. For unusual, take a look at Kensington Court Mews, right there at the end of Thackeray Street; and Canning Place Mews, and De Vere Mews. They’re that mysterious – it’s like peering into a monk’s cowl. And then the penny drops: the stabling was on the first floor. So where the garages are today, that’s where the carriages were kept. There was a curving, gently sloping ramp to get the horses up to the first floor (De Vere Mews is still ramped!). And the stableman and his family lived in the storey and a half at the top. And why do it that way round? After all, it’s not easy to get horses up to the first floor. But then it’s even harder to get carriages up there. If you look closely at Kensington Court Mews you can see lots of evidence that points to that original use. The depth of the balcony and the width of the doors, for example. The balconies are much deeper than they ever would have been if they had been designed originally for human beings. But they had to be that deep in order to get the horses in and out. Similarly the doors. It’s readily apparent that they were originally much bigger – they were stable doors that were ‘filled in’ to make them people-sized.
And as for wondrous strange ‘outsiders’? Voilà! – just there at the Kensington Square end of Thackeray Street (No. 11), habitait the great French statesman and survivor, Talleyrand, pinned and wriggling under Napoleon’s verbal dart – merde dans un bas de soie (‘shit in silk stockings’). Also, in the square itself (at No. 18): John Stuart Mill, forever beating back against the current of the education his father had visited upon him (he could read and write ancient Greek as a three-year-old and Latin followed a year later – the nervous breakdown came seventeen years later). And a young American woman named Isadora Duncan, who pitched up late one night, climbed over the railings of the gardens and danced by moonlight in the verdant green. She was spotted by the very beautiful woman who lived in No. 33, who came out of her house, crossed to the railings and called out, ‘Where are you from?’ Getting the reply, ‘From the moon’, the classic beauty responded, ‘That’s all very well, my dear, but you really must come inside and have something to eat.’ That composed, serene beauty was the famous actress Mrs Patrick Campbell (she of mixed Italian and English parentage), for whom George Bernard Shaw wrote the part of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion (or My Fair Lady, as the musical became). And it was that chance encounter – midnight and moonlight-drenched – in Kensington Square that launched Isadora Duncan’s fabulous career as a dancer.
Then there was that consummate outsider, William Makepeace Thackeray himself, penning the greatest novel in the English language, Vanity Fair, at 16 Young Street, just off the square. Or the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, touching down at No. 41 Kensington Square. Talk about a perfect ‘fit’ of resident and residence. Medievalist that he was, Burne-Jones eschewed the ‘modern age’. And Kensington Square makes its disdain for the goings-on of the last 250 years perfectly clear in the way it resolutely turns its back on – ‘cuts dead’ – the High Street and ‘modern’ Kensington.
Much the same goes for the Kensington Church Walk – Holland Street – Carmel Court – Duke’s Lane sequence. It’s the other must-see Kensington neighbourhood. Must-see, providing you can find it. It’s so tucked away you’d think its streets and houses ran up there when they were young, playing at hide-and-seek. Ran up there and got lost – couldn’t find their way out. Centuries went by and those ‘youngsters’ gnarled into the very old streets and houses they are today. At one point in there – it’s off Kensington Church Walk – you’ve got an innermost sanctum of a courtyard tucked away behind a hidden courtyard running off a secret neighbourhood. It’s like one of those sets of nesting Russian dolls.
And talk about fabulous ‘outsiders’ inside deepest Kensington – right there you’ve got the American poet Ezra Pound and his avant-garde twentieth-century poetic movement, imagism. Pound said, ‘Imagism began in Kensington Church Walk.’ The house where he had rooms – it’s marked with a blue plaque – is surely the most extraordinary small literary house in the world. Counting Pound, it has connections with no fewer than six famous twentieth-century writers. All of them, yes, ‘outsiders’. The Americans William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost were put up there by Pound when they were in London. As was D H Lawrence. Laurie Lee courted his future wife there. And T S Eliot, of course, knew it from Pound’s time there. For the record, the flat where Eliot lived and died is in Kensington Court Place.
Off Kensington Church Walk is the parish church, St Mary Abbots. Pound married Dorothy Shakespeare there. Was ever a poet’s bride better named? Beatrix Potter also tied the knot there, As did W S Gilbert. The church is shot through with high strangeness – and estrangement. There’s a plaque that lists all the vicars from 1242 to the present day. The roll call begins with a series of particuled Norman French names – Roger de Besthorpe (1260), Thomas de Rysleppe (1328), Gilbert de Raulein (1363). The particule is the giveaway – it’s like a cockade on a beret! And let’s make a ‘connection’ here – the De Vere of De Vere Mews was Norman French. But then – in 1371 – John Thomas. Followed by John Trigg. Followed by William Baker. Undeniably English names. As is every name that follows that late fourteenth century trio. That sequence is a distillation of the Norman Conquest and its aftermath.
Another plaque commemorates Mrs Jael Boscawen née Godolphin, who was born in 1647 and died in 1730 (what her dates tell us of course is that her formative, teenage years and prime of adulthood coincided with the naughty 1660s and 1670s of the Restoration). It reads, in part: ‘She was adorned with rare faculties of the mind; singular acuteness sagacity and judgement, with a generous heart, full of piety and devotion to God, full of modesty candour diffusive charity and universal benevolence to mankind, beloved admired revered by all as well as by her relations, as being confessedly the ornament, and at the same time the tacit reproach of a wicked age’ [my italics]. What to make of this? What is so revealing is the desperate, lashed-to-the-mast register of the prose. It speaks volumes about the age, and about how Mrs Boscawen née Godolphin of the village of Kensington was at variance with it.
‘At variance’ could have been the great novelist Thomas Hardy’s middle name. Coming as he did from virtually a peasant background in the West Country, Hardy was always impressed by wealth. Attending a service – and attending to the wealth – at St Mary Abbot’s, Hardy said that when the congregation rose the rustling of the silk dresses was like the beating of the devil’s wings in Paradise Lost.
Up close – Kensington
Consider the finials of the village. For example, the very pretty little set of them at the western end of Duke’s Lane. A finial is the teardrop- or arrowhead-shaped bit of fancywork at the top of many London iron garden railings. Before Prince Albert died, in 1861, London’s finials would normally have been painted very bright colours – golds, reds and the like. They were London’s bunting! But when the Prince died they were uniformly painted black as a token of respect. And to this day almost all of them are still black.
Kensington Palace Gardens
Now two quick flits. And sips. A stone’s throw away from the church, towards the palace, is Kensington Palace Gardens. Or Millionaires’ Row, as Londoners call it. It’s a gated, private road mightily cliffed with Victorian mansions – Victorian mansions that are some of the most expensive houses in the world. Today many of them are embassies. In its forbiddingness and (restrained) ostentation, its exclusivity and dizzying plurality (Nepalese and Nigerian, Romanian and Russian, Israeli and Egyptian), the street is the diplomatic/architectural equivalent of a masked ball. As for the Palace, like the village it’s a part of, it’s walled and enclosed and secret-gardened (the Sunken Garden – another must-see) and yet surprisingly accessible. It is quintessentially the Palace of Outsiders. Royal Outsiders, but outsiders nevertheless. Most recently of course, the late Princesses, Diana and Margaret. But also the man who acquired what was a Jacobean country house and turned it into a palace: William III. He was, after all, a Dutchman. The statue of him in front of the palace is beyond compare in its sneering arrogance and prodigious self-satisfaction. Which is by way of saying, what it’s really all about is the man whose gift it was: Kaiser Wilhelm II, that devil’s brew of vanity and insecurity, and paragon of ‘outsiders’.
En route to the Round Pond in the Gardens, do spare a thought for George II and his consort, Queen Caroline (of Brandenburg-Ansbach). Indeed, we have her to thank for Kensington Gardens and the Round Pond. George II died at Kensington Palace. He died in the water closet (on the wrong throne). Caroline was much loved. Intelligent, attractive, cultured, hard-working, she organised everything for her husband. Even unto choosing his mistresses. She made sure they were very beautiful – and very stupid.
And see how the outsiders gather at the Round Pond. There’s Virginia Woolf sailing toy boats as a child. And a grown-up Shelley sailing paper boats. Paper boats made out of banknotes – high style and rebellion do often fandango! But that vignette is also forever haunted by what it prefigures: his pregnant wife Harriet’s suicide by drowning in the nearby Serpentine and his own death in a sea-storm off Genoa. And there – in another Round Pond spot of time – is J M Barrie meeting the little boy who served as the model for Peter Pan. Barrie was barely five feet tall; he was a Scot in London; he was perhaps a paedophile; he was eternally in the shadow of the shade of his older brother David who drowned, aged thirteen, when Barrie was six: it doesn’t come much more alien, more outsiderly than that. Kensington was Never Never Land bacause Barrie was a walking case of Never Never Land and Barrie was in Kensington.1
Now one more hidden Kensington enclave: windsock-shaped, blue-plaque-spangled, Hyde Park Gate West. What a rum lot you find down there. That world-bestriding maverick2 Winston Churchill lived and died at Nos 27–28. Above the blue plaque is the window where he made his last ‘public’ appearance – to wave to the crowd that had gathered outside to pay tribute to him on his ninetieth birthday. Chief Scout of the World Baden-Powell was at No. 9. The sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein – he who could turn marble into birdsong – lived at No. 18. Across the street, at No. 29, the novelist Enid Bagnold, she who was bedded under a table at the Café Royale by the Victorian roué Frank Harris. At No. 22, the birthplace and childhood home of Virginia Woolf. It’s the only house in London with three blue plaques – they’re like a row of blue buttons. One for Virginia, one for her sister Vanessa Bell and one for their father, Sir Leslie Stephen.
And since the oak is in the acorn let’s end at the beginning. The best way to do that is to take your leave – cross the threshold into Westminster and pause on the corner of Kensington Gore and Exhibition Row. London cabbies call it ‘the hot and cold corner’ because the handsome red brick building there is the Royal Geographical Society with its statue of David Livingstone (of Africa) on the north wall and one of Shackleton (of Antarctica) on the east wall.
And since nothing in London catapults us back further – and faster – than names let’s take a ride on Kensington Gore. Gore is from gara. Old English, it refers to the triangular patches of ground that were left when irregularly shaped fields were ploughed. As for Kensington – ton or tun is also Old English (and Old Norse). It means enclosure, farm, estate. And Kensing? Nobody knows for sure, but the best guess is that it comes from the name of an Anglo-Saxon chieftain or smallholder. Fit those two ancient linguistic shards together and you get – scholars say – Cynesige’s farm.
And there – in those ancient names – is Kensington’s DNA: enclosures, irregular nooks and crannies, rural character and Englishness. And, yes, obduracy.
Without being too schematic about these matters, maybe those are the qualities a place has to have – the shell it has to secrete about itself – if it is to survive, remain true to itself, indeed thrive anent the mighty ocean of London. Certainly – as we’ve seen – that ancient village is still there. But – as we’ve also seen – to find it you have to do some exploring. Like Shackleton, you have to find your way back.
1. The statue of Peter Pan – in its dappled glade by the Serpentine – is well worth finding.
2. Churchill liked to work in his bed. His small grandson, Nicholas Soames, once burst in upon him and asked, ‘Gwandpa, is it twue that you’re the gweatest man in the world?’ Churchill took out his stogey and growled, ‘Yes, now bugger off.’