The Ladbroke Association

When the Ladbroke estate was developed between 1820 and 1870, all the houses were intended as single family homes. At that time, except for serviced “chambers” for rich bachelors and short-term stays in London, flats were regarded as for the poor. As Richard Phene Spiers, a well-known architect of the time, noted in an address to the Royal Institute of Architects in December 1871, “there seems to be a decided distaste on the part of the English public to living in flats.” In Paris, on the other hand, flats were very popular, a fact that he attributed to the French “being accustomed to be satisfied with a much smaller quantity of everything than we are. They use very little water, and do not always see the necessity for a bath at home; it is the same with regard to food and everything else. The rooms are only just as large as is necessary. They have not large families or it would be difficult to understand how they could manage with such small accommodation.”

Flats seem to have been mistrusted on a number of counts. No doubt because they were associated with the poor, flats were seen as unsanitary and liable to spread disease.  It would also be unpleasant for the upper classes to live in enforced close proximity with their servants and to have to run the risk of meeting artisans and tradesmen on the stairs. Moreover, having the bedrooms on the same floor as the living rooms could encourage immorality – a sentiment probably strengthened by the fact that the French, known for their promiscuous habits, lived in flats.

All this was about to change. By the mid-1870s, there was beginning to be a demand in London for dwellings for small middle class families which could be managed with fewer servants and which were relatively near the centre of town. Large family houses were proving difficult to let or sell, and the day of the mansion flat was at hand. In the latter part of the 1870s, the architect Richard Norman Shaw designed a massive block of flats to stand next to the Albert Hall, the present Albert Hall Mansions. Shaw also departed from the then current fashion for stucco by building his new block in red-brick. The project was a great success. For the next three decades, red-brick mansion blocks became all the rage.

The Ladbroke estate was fully built-up by the time the mansion block boom began. But nevertheless two red-brick mansion blocks were constructed around 1900, in both cases replacing earlier family villas. The first is Crescent Mansions at the west end of Elgin Crescent (see photograph above). Originally, as the 1863 Ordnance Survey map shows, there were two villas standing in their own large grounds, Clifton Lodge and Arundel Villa, at this end of Elgin Crescent. But in the early 1900s Clifton Villa had been demolished (possibly after fire damage) and Crescent Mansions erected in its place.

Around the same time, the middle house of one of the very grand trios of stucco villas in Kensington Park Gardens was destroyed by fire. Again it was decided not to rebuild it to match its neighbours but to erect a seven-storey mansion block with one flat per floor. It is red-brick and terracotta, considerably more ornate than Crescent Mansions, to such an extent that it has been nick-named Little Harrods by the locals. It looks totally out of place, but it is such an extraordinary building that it has its own charm.