The cultural riches surrounding Kensington Gate

Walk south from Kensington Park and you will soon reach Palace Gate. This is an impressive address, featuring embassies, high commissions and red-brick mansion blocks. A narrow garden square leads off the street, lined on both sides with tall terraces of stucco-fronted townhouses. The name of the square is Kensington Gate.

The facades of Kensington Gate are decorated in an elegant Italianate style. This includes entrance porticos supported by Ionic columns, as well as classical details on the balconies, entablature and overhanging eaves. Meanwhile, campanile-style towers on the end properties and a rounded turret at one corner add to the impression of grandeur.

Russell Simpson currently have a unique Grade-II listed family home for sale on the square. This is a magnificent property with eight bedrooms and a spacious south-facing garden. Its lower levels are decorated in a traditional style, offering high ceilings, elegant plasterwork and attractive fireplaces.

But these details are matched with modern features elsewhere, such as the gym, the glass-walled dining area that overlooks the garden and the air conditioning throughout the main house. Furthermore, the house has an attached mews property on the far side of the garden, which includes a media room.

Kensington Gate was built in the mid-nineteenth century on a stretch of farmland called Butt’s Field. It belonged to the Campden Charities estate, which was created in the seventeenth century after the death of Sir Baptist Hicks, Viscount Campden, and his wife Elizabeth. Their wills bequeathed money for the purchase of local land, which could be rented out for ‘the most poor and needy people.’

In 1778-9, Kensington Workhouse was built on the southern side of Butt’s Field. It was probably visited by novelist Charles Dickens when living in Chelsea and writing Oliver Twist. However, when a new workhouse was built on nearby Marloes Road in 1849, the Campden Trustees began to redevelop the site.

A speculator named John Inderwick was chosen for the job. A well-known importer of tobacco and meerschaum pipes, Inderwick had already developed several streets in Kensington Town. He hired the architect Alfred Cubitt Bean to design a square for prosperous members of the middle classes.

Building work took place between 1850-1. Although the main terraces were three storeys tall, with additional basements and attics, further storeys were added to each end, with Tuscan towers on the corners contributing to the sense of spectacle.

By the census of 1861, the residents of Kensington Gate included four civil servants, three lawyers, three merchants, two ladies of title, a physician, an ironmaster, a mine proprietor, and a professor of music. There were also a pair of artists: the American landscape painter Jasper Francis Cropsey and the British sculptor Richard Westmacott, who created the Wellington Monument at Hyde Park Corner.

The rest of Butt’s Field was also developed around this time. For instance, in the 1830s and early 1840s, Joshua Flesher Hanson constructed much of Hyde Park Gate, the pair of streets adjacent to Kensington Gate. The address later became home to several celebrated figures, including Robert Baden Powell, founder of the scouting movement, and Sir Leslie Stephen, father to the writer Virginia Woolf and the artist Vanessa Bell. Meanwhile, in the mid-twentieth century, the street was occupied by sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein and Sir Winston Churchill in his final years.

Today, the properties that occupy the former Butt’s Field are some of the most prestigious in Kensington. They offer a mix of grand streets and squares, quiet residential roads, and a few charming mews streets too. Hyde Park is close, as well as the world-class cultural institutions of South Kensington, but there are also smaller spots that local residents come to love.

For instance, Launceston Place offers restaurants, art galleries, and a popular Danish bakery. Meanwhile, Gloucester Road is an increasingly upmarket location, with a branch of the Chelsea-favourite Partridges, as well as the long-established trattoria Da Mario, which boasts Madonna, Dustin Hoffman and Renée Zellweger among its fans. Taken together, it gives a village-like atmosphere to these streets, within easy reach of London’s most celebrated venues, without losing their sense of seclusion and calm.