Chelsea Mornings

"Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning…" sang Joni Mitchell. Last year my sister and her family were staying in Cheyne Walk for nine months while their home was being torn apart by builders. I took the opportunity to stay with them and get to know the area better. I was amazed to discover that it was the very spot where both Whistler spent his last years and Epstein had a studio. The Art Nouveau properties (72 –74) were destroyed in an air raid in 1941. Chelsea Old Church, next door, was also badly bombed, but its chapel, commissioned by Sir Thomas More in 1528 survived, close by where More’s demolished mansion once stood. In 1965 a sunken garden was created on the site of the old orchard, appropriately called Roper’s Garden with a sculpture by Epstein overlooking the Thames.
However, a lot of the street remains in tact and I have listed houses worth seeing if you are in the area. Apart from Thomas Carlyle’s house in nearby Cheyne Row, owned by the National Trust, none of them is open to the public but it is fascinating to imagine the comings and goings of artists and writers, let alone canvases and manuscripts, over the years.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti lived at Number 16, the Queen’s House, built in 1717; Swinburne and Meredith also stayed there for periods of time. George Eliot lived at Number 4, William Leigh Hunt at 22 and Mrs. Gaskell at 93. Joseph Mallord William Turner lived further along at 119, close to Battersea Bridge, as did Sylvia Pankhurst. Turner had iron railings installed on the roof of Reach House so he could admire the sunsets across the river.
Close by, in Cheyne Row, William de Morgan, the potter, started his own tile kiln in 1872, at Number 30. Oscar Wilde lived at 34, Tite Street where John Singer Sargent and Augustus John had studios at Number 33 in 1885 and 1940. The White House, opposite, built for Whistler - one of several houses in Chelsea he lived in – was pulled down in 1961.
Unlike today, Chelsea residents were often far from wealthy: Leigh Hunt’s family of seven children sometimes went without bread. Edith Holden, who wrote what was to become ‘The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady’ and her sculptor husband lived at 2, Oakley Crescent. William Holman Hunt’s address, 5 Prospect Place, was demolished for the construction of a hospital for sick and incurable children in 1875 and has now been converted in flats.
Over the years, many interesting houses have been lost including that of Doctor Phene in Upper Cheyne Row, demolished in 1924 and elaborately decorated with dragons, busts and armorial bearings, all painted in brilliant colours. Street numbers have changed and not every house mentioned is identifiable by a blue plaque. I am still looking for Lindsey House where Marc Brunel, and later, Whistler, lived and trying to imagine Linda’s fictitious house in Nancy Mitford’s "The Pursuit of Love" with all her couture clothes stashed in trunks in the basement.
Waterstone’s, in the Kings Road, has a good selection of books on the area. Treat yourself to one and enjoy strolling round Chelsea one sunny morning, gazing at the same stretch of river Turner, Whistler and others once painted years before.
(Originally published in INSIGHT magazine a few years back)