Kensal New Town (1860s)
An example of how old maps can demonstrate how London developed.
Chelsea, like Kensington, was a series of parishes before it became a borough. St Luke's Chelsea had a detached section, straddling the Harrow Road east of the Plough, Kensal Green and miles from the rest of the parish.
The part of 'St Luke's Chelsea (detached)' south of the Harrow Road and south of the Grand Union Canal was developed as a standalone urban area, also a long way from the contiguous built-up area of London during the late 1830s as 'Kensal New Town'. In its first few decades it was very poor and largely turned over to pig keeping. Its spread was strictly within the boundary of the Chelsea parish - you can see the dashed parish boundary line confining Kensal New Town to the south.
Soon after, the Great Western Railway was built, and Kensal Town became increasingly isolated, hemmed in by canal and train tracks. The only way out to Harrow Road to the north was by using a halfpenny ferry. This was replaced by steps after this map was published on the site of the ferry. Thankfully the steps were free to use but became known as the 'Ha'penny Steps'.
The Western Gas Works were built, providing new employment opportunities.
In the 1870s, the first section of the Queen's Park Estate was built north of Harrow Road, at first and again exactly confined within St Luke's Chelsea. Road naming in Queen's Park was as surreal as Kensal Town. Each new road was either numbered or took consecutive letters of the alphabet. In Kensal Town they had been named after compass points.
As the borough system took over from the parish system a decade after that, both Kensal Town (now Kensington) and Queen's Park (now Paddington) broke out of their geographical limits and their roadnaming conventions.
