In 1599 Sir Walter Cope, an influential courtier, bought Abbots Kensington manor from Queen Elizabeth I. He was collecting North Kensington manors. In 1591 he had bought West Town and in 1599 he also bought Notting Barnes, which later became Notting Hill. Cope built himself a grand home, known as “Cope’s Castle”.
Cope’s daughter, Isabel, married Sir Henry Rich, the First Earl of Holland. The estate passed into the Rich family and “Cope’s Castle” became “Holland House”. When the Third Earl died, his wife married Joseph Addison the famous writer and founder of the Spectator who died in Holland House in 1719.
When Edward Henry Rich, the Fourth Earl of Holland died in 1721, his aunt Elizabeth Edwardes (née Rich) inherited the estate. She had married Francis Edwardes from Pembrokeshire. From her it passed to their eldest son Edward Edwardes. Edward died and left it to his brother William in entail. (this meant that the future succession of the estate through several generations was prescribed in Edward’s will and William did not own it outright).
William Edwardes granted a 99 year lease of Holland House and its surrounding grounds in 1746 to Henry Fox, a politician. In 1767 Fox persuaded Edwardes to sell the freehold of the property to him. Fox was so keen on his house, that when he was elevated to the peerage he ‘borrowed’ the name Baron Holland. He had no connection with the earlier Earls of Holland. In fact that wasn’t all he borrowed. He financed the purchase with profits he’d made by speculating with the public funds he was holding as Paymaster General. Over the years Baron Holland took leases of much of the rest of the Edwardes’ land in North Kensington.
The First Baron Holland and his son the Second Baron died in quick succession, and his brother, the Third Baron inherited the estate at the age of one in 1774 He had an affair with his future wife while she was still married to someone else, and she was divorced for adultery as a result. That meant when they married she was not allowed to attend the royal circle. She was a lively lady and made Holland House a magnet for society – or at least those members who were out of sympathy with the court. They were certainly not establishment figures; they were so taken with Napoleon that they sent him plum jam and a refrigerator to make his life more pleasant in Elba.
Development of the Holland Estate
It was the Third Lord Holland who decided to cash in on the potential for development. He initiated the building of Addison Road in the mid-1820s.(See the previous page – Joseph Addison had lived and died at Holland House a century and a half earlier). But this coincided with a downturn in the property market, so building stopped almost as quickly as it had begun.
The Third Lord Holland died in 1840, leaving his wife with a life interest. She was extremely extravagant and wanted to sell land close to Holland House for development. But she died in 1845 and the Fourth Lord Holland inherited the estate outright. The housing market had begun to improve and he continued the former development plans.
The Fourth Lord Holland died in 1859. He had no children and the property passed to his widow. Building continued. The family luck with sewers continued. In the 1860s the railway company wanted to construct an “Addison Road” station. Lady Holland sold them the land, on condition that they constructed a new road – Russell Road – and a sewer beside it. This gave a jump-start to the development of that part of the estate.
Lady Holland’s lavish party-giving soon landed her in financial difficulties. To save herself, she sold the estate to a distant relative, Edward Fox-Strangways, the Fifth Earl of Ilchester. (Stephen Fox, the First Earl of Ilchester had been the elder brother of the first Lord Holland, so the estate remained in the family). The deal was that he paid her an annuity and allowed her to live in the house for the rest of her life.
When Lady Holland died in 1889, the Earl moved into Holland House himself and his successors also lived there. It was severely bombed in the Second World War. After the War it was substantially restored. The Earl of Ilchester continued the process of development on the estate, particularly at Melbury Road.
Creation of the Norland Estate
The Norland Estate is 52 acres just above Holland Park Avenue, from the present Holland Road in the west to Portland Road and Pottery Lane in the east.
A Westminster brewer named Thomas Greene bought the land in the early 18th century. It had a large house already called “Norlands” near today’s Norland Square. In 1740 Greene died and his grandson, Edward Burnaby Greene, inherited it. Although he inherited a considerable fortune apart from this property, his lavish lifestyle soon landed him deep in debt. In 1761 he let the house and it was used as a military academy for many years.
Greene died in 1788 and in 1792 Benjamin Vulliamy, a Pall Mall watchmaker, bought the house and the surrounding land and moved into it. The original Norland House burnt down in 1825, and the family offered to sell the estate to the local authority for use as a lunatic asylum. But the offer was turned down and the family continued to own the estate until 1839.
This article first appeared on the now defunct Kensington Living website. All rights and copyright to the original material is retained by that website which appeared at: http://www.kensingtonliving.co.uk