The fascinating people that found a home on Stanford Road

If you walk the streets of West London, you will soon notice the blue plaques decorating the buildings. These plaques record houses that were once home to famous residents: politicians and writers, artists and aristocrats. But the histories of the houses without blue plaques are no less interesting. A perfect example can be found on Stanford Road, in a charming property recently sold by Russell Simpson.

Stanford Road runs north to south, connecting Cornwall Gardens with Kensington Court Place. It was laid out in the early 1850s as part of the Vallotton Estate, around a decade after Kensington New Town was built by the developer John Inderwick. The Vallotton family’s wealth came from fashionable haberdashery, but in the late 18th century and early 19th century they also began acquiring land to the west of London.

For much of its history, Stanford Road was occupied by a mix of middle-class professionals. Barristers and solicitors, clerks and officials, retired army officers and a small number of actors, writers, and artists. Some of the more notable residents included Henry Compton, a well-known Shakespearian actor who was famed for his comic roles, and Frederick Newton Gisborne, an inventor who laid the first deep-sea cable in North American waters.

Later the street became home to the Irish-born journalist Samuel Carter Hall, who inspired Dickens’ character Mr Pecksniff in The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit; the diplomat Sir Henry Crofton Lowther, who was ambassador to Chile and Denmark; and the radio broadcaster Ruth Drew, who gave weekly bulletins during the Second World War to housewives dealing with domestic questions.

Nos. 5 and 7 Stanford Road were a semi-detached pair of houses constructed in 1852 by the builder David Howell, who was also responsible for terraces on Cottesmore Gardens and Eldon Road. Two years later, the first tenants moved in to No.7, paying a rent of £42 per annum.

The tenants were a newly married couple named John and Sophia Macnab. John was a manager at the Oriental Bank in Threadneedle Street, a British bank in India with outposts in Chinese treaty ports, as well as Hong Kong, Japan, Mauritius and South Africa.

Sophia, meanwhile, was the daughter of Lewis Nockalls Cottingham, a respected architect who pioneered the Gothic Revival style. He not only built and restored many churches, but was almost chosen to design the new Houses of Parliament. Sophia’s brother was also an architect, though he absconded to America with money stolen from Herefordshire Cathedral, only to drown after his ship foundered on the way to New York.

In 1867, the next tenants to move in were Rev. Charles Blathwayt and his wife Anne. The priest was born in Somerset and educated in Cambridge; while his wife was the daughter of the Clerk of Recognizances at the House of Commons. After them the property was home to Frederick Leach, a bachelor from a landed Pembrokeshire family who worked as a senior clerk in the War Office.

The residents of No.7 Stanford Road offer a picture of the entire neighbourhood. The professional classes who occupied Kensington in the second half of the nineteenth century had links to the clergy and the landed gentry, to the Army and the Empire, and also to the increasingly globalised economy.

In the mid-twentieth century, the house was occupied by the proprietor of a hotel and his sister; by an accountant and his wife; and later by a lawyer and his family. Then, in the early Seventies it was purchased by the present owners, remaining in the family’s possession for the last fifty years.

During this period, Kensington became a fashionable address. This neighbourhood began to attract aristocratic residents, living on nearby Cottesmore Gardens, as well as Stanford Road. Nonetheless, the mix of long-term inhabitants and quiet cul-de-sacs meant the streets preserved their village-like atmosphere.

These days it’s rare for a family to remain in one house for many decades, but if you enter No.7 that sense of continuity is strong. Many of the rooms contain clocks, which give an impression of passing time, while the watercolours on the wall add to the historic feel. If you look from the upper-storey windows at the rear of the property, down the long vista of back gardens from the adjacent terraces, you glimpse the same view that every one of the former residents would have enjoyed. And you realise how much of the past one property can contain, and how diverse the lives that occupy a single London street.