An early photograph of Gardeners Buildings and Market Court on the south side of Kensington High Street, three years before the site was demolished. The inhabitants pose for the camera.
The second half of the eighteenth century saw the completion of continuous building along the High Street frontage between Colby House and King Street, and the growth of dense, grubby courts behind. On the future Barkers site at least one court, Hall’s Court, named after Edmund Hall, a bricklayer, had been created shortly after 1707 on a small freehold belonging successively to Anna Maria Browne, Harris Thurloe Brace and the Alexander family, property owners on a larger scale elsewhere in Kensington.
In the 1770s this was expanded by infilling and addition to become Market Court and Gardeners Buildings. Duckmanton’s Yard nearby was another court of uncertain date, on one of the many small landholdings into which the Barkers site was then divided.
Courts such as this one were frequently over-crowded with cramped and insanitary conditions.
The men primarily worked in the market gardens while their wives took in laundry or hawked wares in the High Street. During the cholera epidemics the death toll was terrible.
This scene is further notable because the upper floor of the building has both wood facing and a wooden inner construction – see the wooden beams under the eaves at the right. This is no longer legal.
Between 1866 and 1868 the Metropolitan Board gradually bought up the ninety-one different lots from the many different freeholders along Kensington High Street, leaseholders, and yearly and weekly tenants. One freeholder, H. B. Alexander, received £14,000 for three houses in the High Street and many small tenements in Market Court and Gardeners Buildings behind.
Demolitions took place in 1868–9.
Image: Historic England