Clarendon Road is one of the W11’s longest streets, running from Holland Park Avenue in the south to Dulford Street in the north.
The area was largely open country when Clarendon Road was created during the second great wave of development on the Ladbroke estate in the 1840s. The estate was still owned at that time by the Ladbroke family in the person of James Weller Ladbroke. It was a time when the population of London was growing rapidly and developers saw rich profits to be made in providing the expanding population with housing.
James Weller Ladbroke had detailed plans drawn up for the western part of the Ladbroke estate, including Clarendon Road, in 1843 and 1846. Ladbroke did not undertake the development himself; instead he signed agreements or building leases with builders or speculators under which they undertook to build a certain number of houses on the plot of land covered by the agreement. Once the houses were built, Ladbroke would then give either the builder or a person nominated by him (usually the person who had provided finance for the construction) 99-year leases of the houses. Ladbroke thus derived his profit from the ground rents (typically about £10 per annum); the developers would derive theirs from letting the houses (which commanded annual rents of £50-60).
Many of those involved in developing Clarendon Road came to financial grief. In the years following the construction of these now desirable villas, the long leaseholds (and sometimes also the freeholds) of individual houses were often bought and sold and mortgaged to secure loans. As a result, the leaseholds quite often ended up in the hands of wealthy spinsters and others living far from the area, for whom they represented reliable investment assets paying a regular return in the form of the rental. Presumably the tenants who actually occupied the properties remained relatively unaffected by all these changes, so long as they went on paying their rents.
Development started from the south, and almost all the houses on the street between Holland Park Avenue and Clarendon Cross were completed during a period of frenzied activity between 1840 and 1846, under the direct auspices of James Weller Ladbroke. The houses were good quality villas, often detached or semi-detached with a good space between them – although most of the gaps between the houses have now been filed by extensions built in the last 50 years. These properties along the southern end of the street are now some of the most desirable houses in the area.
Originally, each terrace of houses had its own name and numbering system, and just to complicate matters the first part of street (up to Lansdowne Walk) was called Park Street; the next part (up to Elgin Crescent) Clarendon Road and the last part Clarendon Road North.
The terraces were Park Villas; Clarendon Terrace (16-26 evens Clarendon Road); Clarendon Villas; Clarendon Villas North; Grove Terrace; Cambridge Villas; Hanover Terrace Villas (Hanover Terrace was the old name of Lansdowne Walk); and St James’s Terrace.
It was not until 1866 that the whole street acquired its current name and numbers.
Most of the houses were put up as speculative ventures, often with finance borrowed from wealthy property speculators. Sometimes Weller Ladbroke himself lent the builders the money to finance the construction. There was a bewildering number of speculators, financiers, architects and builders involved, including many of the Ladbroke area’s best known players such as Thomas Allason (the surveyor to the Ladbroke Estate and one of the area’s most distinguished architects); William John Drew, a builder/architect (the distinction was not always clear in those days); Richard Roy (a speculating solicitor); the Rev. Dr Samuel Walker (a wealthy speculating clergyman); and William Reynolds (a builder who became a developer and also tried his hand at being a publican, and who was largely responsible for the introduction of the pairs of semi-detached villas that are such a characteristic of Clarendon Road).
The Survey of London has made a brave attempt to clarify the relationships between these various players, but for many of the houses the detail of which parties were responsible for the finance, design and construction remains obscure. Generally, however, in the case of Roy and Reynolds, who were partners on many of the Clarendon Road houses, it was Reynolds who organised the building of the roads, sewers and houses; and Roy who raised the necessary capital.
As the road formed the western boundary of the Ladbroke family’s estate, it has few connecting links with the parallel Portland Road to the west, on the Norland estate. Several roads run from the east into Clarendon Road from other parts of the Ladbroke estate, most deliberately designed to form vistas, so the road’s relationship with the rest of the Ladbroke estate is clearly demonstrated. But the houses on the western side form almost a wall separating the estate from the Norland area and there are no carefully designed vistas through to the west, creating, in the words of the Borough’s Conservation Area Proposal Statement for the Ladbroke estate, an effect ‘of subtle enclosure; the eye is unaware of adjacent contrasting areas “outside”’.
The road seems in the 19th century to have been rather more of a through route than it is today. In 1892, Cardinal Manning’s funeral cortège processed along Clarendon Road on its way to Kensal Green cemetery [The Times]. As well as the Castle on the corner of Holland Park Avenue, there were three other pubs or inns to take advantage of passing traffic, the Clarendon Hotel at No. 85; the Britannia at No. 123a; and the Talbot Arms on the other side of the road beyond Cornwall Crescent. Horse-drawn buses used to run up Clarendon Road.
In the 20th century, like most of the rest of the area, Clarendon Road went downhill and many of the houses were turned into flats and lodgings, only to become smart again in the last third of the century. The street was also badly knocked about in the Blitz. Several houses were damaged by bombs and were later demolished and replaced, or else repaired on the cheap, with few or none of the original decorative features being replaced. Now, as many of the houses are returning to single occupancy, and the new owners are restoring lost cornices, window surrounds and porches.
