Two Conservation Areas, One Street
The Kensington Conservation Area includes only the west, odd-numbered side of Kensington Church Street. The east, even-numbered side lies in the Kensington Palace Conservation Area, which carries broader Article 4 directions.
That matters in practice. Direction 57, covering Kensington Palace addresses, withdraws four classes of permitted development including alterations to elevations fronting a highway, alterations to rear elevations, hardstanding within the curtilage, and the painting of any exterior fronting a highway. The Kensington side has nothing so wide.
So the first question on this street is which number you are, not which street. An owner reading the wrong appraisal, or the wrong direction, will reach the wrong answer about something as simple as repainting.
The Terraces
The street began as Church Lane, linking the Notting Hill gravel pits to the old village church, and it developed piecemeal, which is why it reads as a series of groups divided by side streets rather than one composition.
Numbers 1 to 17, odd, are a fine early to mid Georgian terrace in brown and yellow brick with gauged red brick flat arches over timber sashes, mostly still in their original six-over-six pattern. All are listed. The appraisal notes that numbers 1 to 9 probably retain their original double-pitched M-shaped roofs behind simple brick parapets, while their eastern neighbours have suffered alterations including roof extensions and, worse in its view, rendering over the brickwork.
Numbers 67 to 81, odd, are the Allason Terrace of 1845, fully stuccoed, with end pavilions, rusticated quoins and triangular pediments, six-over-six sashes, and a composition unified by parapet, cornice, cast iron balustrade and the shopfront line. The pediments at 79 and 81 have been lost or poorly reinstated.
Flats, Shopfronts and What That Changes
Most buildings on this street are flats over shops. Permitted development rights only ever applied to dwellinghouses, so a flat has none to withdraw: alterations that a neighbour in a house might once have made freely have always required an application here.
The shopfront is treated as part of the building rather than as a tenant's fitting. The appraisal lists the components it expects to see preserved: narrow fascias, timber columns, stallrisers, pilasters, console brackets, terrazzo entrance floors and recessed doors, and it treats the shopfront line as a horizontal element unifying the whole terrace. Ground floor changes are therefore assessed against the composition, not the unit.
It names specific losses too. The shopfront at number 25 was very regrettably removed, leaving what the appraisal calls a black scar where the fascia had been. At 31 and 32 the fascia boards are oversized despite the original stone ones surviving above or behind them.