Cheyne Conservation Area

Cheyne has seen the longest historical development in the Royal Borough, and was known as a village of palaces before Kensington Palace was built. The Georgian houses in its core, in Cheyne Walk, Cheyne Row, Lawrence Street, Upper Cheyne Row and part of Old Church Street, are among the oldest and finest buildings in the borough.

The dates are unusually precise. Numbers 23 and 24 Lawrence Street, Duke's House and Monmouth House, are about 1705. Numbers 16 to 34 Cheyne Row are 1708, and a plaque at number 16 reads simply: this is Cheyne Row 1708. The western section of Upper Cheyne Row is about 1710 to 1715, with number 1, The Cottage, appearing in the rate books from 1715. Numbers 2 to 6, 15 and 16 Cheyne Walk are about 1717 to 1718, part of Sloane's riverside ribbon development. Numbers 19 to 26 Cheyne Walk were built between 1759 and 1765 on the site of Henry VIII's manor house, and number 24 still contains seven vaults from it.

Older fabric survives in fragments: a timber framed building of 1587 and a seventeenth century workman's cottage at the Chelsea Open Air Nursery, 51 Glebe Place, which the appraisal calls of great conservation value for a vernacular architecture rare in London as a whole. Crosby Hall is older still, at 1466, but is an import, moved from Bishopsgate and re-erected here in 1910.

This is the most technically distinct part of the borough, and the rarest window type in it is here.

The earliest eighteenth century sashes have visible sash boxes flush with the brickwork, and these survive in several houses in Cheyne Row, Upper Cheyne Row and Lawrence Street. The Building Acts of 1709 and 1774 required sash boxes to be set back from the front elevation and then into reveals, to slow the spread of fire. Later in the century box frames were therefore concealed, and although sashes were still divided into small panes, usually six over six, the glazing bars became thinner and more elegant. A flush sash box is not a defect to be corrected; it is the earliest surviving form.

The chronology then runs on. Many early Victorian houses, in Paultons Square, Oakley Street and Margaretta Terrace, still carry Georgian six over six sashes. Mid Victorian houses in Glebe Place and the north end of Bramerton Street have plain sashes with heavier glass requiring horns. Late Victorian Queen Anne houses have many small panes in the upper sash and only one or two below. The Domestic Revival houses in Petyt Place and Upper Cheyne Row have metal casements with small square leaded panes.

The uniformity rule is stated plainly: one of the most important characteristics of the Victorian terraces is that all the windows match across the terrace and change only with the floor level, getting smaller and less decorated as they rise. Where glazing patterns vary across a terrace, that harms its essential uniform character.

Flush Sash Boxes

Pre-1709 form, surviving in Cheyne Row, Upper Cheyne Row and Lawrence Street. The rarest window type in the borough.

Six over Six

Georgian, and carried on into the early Victorian houses of Paultons Square, Oakley Street and Margaretta Terrace.

Horned Sashes

Mid Victorian, where heavier plate glass needed a strengthened frame. Glebe Place and north Bramerton Street.

Leaded Casements

Domestic Revival, Petyt Place and parts of Upper Cheyne Row. Not a later alteration.

The appraisal is blunter on this than any of its neighbours. The conservation area is generally in very good condition, but perhaps the most harmful alterations have been those to the rooflines. Terraces and individual houses would originally have been built with the same roof treatment, often concealed behind a parapet, and in the twentieth century many mansards were added in arbitrary designs that failed to preserve the unity of the groups.

It also refuses to let bad precedent accumulate: modern mansard additions have not always been successful, and their presence should not set a precedent for others that would be harmful. That is a materially stronger position than the precedent tests used in Kensington and The Boltons.

It names both the good and the bad. Numbers 107 and 108 Cheyne Walk have well designed subordinate mansards with small windows. Numbers 93 and 94 have dormers concealed from street view and discreet in form. Against those: the triple dormer to number 109 is excessive and harmful; number 104's double height mansard is out of proportion and of poor design; number 102 is a whole storey higher, made worse by an arched trellis above the parapet; and number 20 Old Church Street had an ungainly mansard added in 1959 that spoils the varied roofline.

Roof terraces are singled out along Cheyne Walk and Oakley Street, where out of character guard rails and trellises are visible, and rooflights have damaged the steep tiled roofslopes at Petyt Place.

The Thames is a constraint as much as a setting. The river prevents development in front of Cheyne Walk and Chelsea Embankment, and allows both to be viewed from the water and from well to the south. Cheyne Walk became the thoroughfare it is in 1874, when Bazalgette built the embankment in front of it: a hammer-dressed granite structure, now listed in its own right, carrying a sewer below and a road above.

The western end has a different character for a reason. When it was proposed in 1896 to continue the embankment west to Cremorne Bridge there was a public outcry, works were initially restricted to minor road improvements, and when the embankment was finally built the road remained narrower than the earlier sections.

East of Oakley Street, Cheyne Walk sits back behind two sections of Embankment Gardens, and the houses there stand behind front gardens with substantial boundaries, gate piers and railings.

Paultons Square is the only development with a central garden square, laid out between 1840 and 1865. Two others were planned and abandoned, at Oakley Gardens and Margaretta Terrace, which is why Margaretta Terrace looks onto the rear elevations of Oakley Street rather than onto a garden.

One control here is stronger than Article 4 and easier to check. Where a building is listed the boundary treatment is usually protected by that listing, but in Cheyne many of the boundaries to listed houses are separately listed in their own right. The boundary to Lindsey House is one. So are the early sixteenth century walls of the Moravian Chapel. That is verifiable per address on the National Heritage List, and it means a front wall can be a listed structure even where the scheme does not touch the house.

On paint, the appraisal is specific rather than general, and it names houses. Painting brick elevations is harmful, particularly where it interrupts a uniform terrace, and Old Church Street and Bramerton Street are named. Number 4 Cheyne Row is sadly painted, destroying the contrast between stuccoed window surrounds, channelled ground floor and stock brick above. Number 92 Cheyne Walk is regrettably painted a bright salmon colour. The removal of paint from numbers 47 and 48 Cheyne Walk would be an enhancement.

Against those it holds up a model: numbers 14 to 25 Oakley Street, where the whole frontage is stuccoed and well conserved with most houses painted the same white, giving what it calls the full palace effect.

Brick cleaning is rare here and the appraisal is glad of it. Where it has happened, in Paultons Square, it damaged the continuity of the set piece and gave a patchwork appearance.