Why did I create a walking tour on The Secret History of Chelsea? Part I

Secret streets, forgotten figures and hidden histories.

Many tourists and Londoners are familiar with Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London and Harrods - the latter being London's 2nd most popular tourist destination. But why should they, and indeed you travel to West London to the quiet and green borough of Chelsea. 

For me, Chelsea captures the heart of British wealth and history; as well as it's tensions and contradictions: the home of enterprising migrants, Victorian artists, lovesick royals, gardens inhabited by medics and crime authors that supplied cotton seeds to the colonies, and punks who ushered in a new era. 

An artichoke plant at the Chelsea Physic Gardens

Chelsea is a village of Palaces, home of rock stars, artists, punks and Princesses. It's royal and bohemian energy may be partly due to it's distance and isolation from the City of London, which is in the East and the earliest place that the Roman's inhabited; and was a bustling town in the Medieval times when Chelsea was not developed and primarily used for agriculture. 

It wasn't until the Tudor times that it began to attract King Henry VIII's attention as his Privy Councillor Sir Thomas More developed a grand mansion Beaufort House in Chelsea in 1520. As Chelsea is by the river, it was a convenient place to live to be able to sail to the Palaces at Greenwich and Richmond. Here More courted philosophers and intellectuals from the Continent exchanging letters with  Erasmus and other thinkers. Even today, Chelsea is extremely popular with Europeans and has many Italians living in the borough. One of it's state schools is named after Thomas More and it is a specialist Catholic language college.  Henry VIII had a manor house in 1536 where Elizabeth I grew up and supposedly planted some mulberry trees. 

The original Beaufort House

Chelsea is distinct in it's relationship with the monarchy. It is one of the few royal borough's, and the spine of the borough - the Kings Road, was once a private road built for Charles II to get to and from his Palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court. Or possibly to visit his lover Nell Gwyn, a former orange seller in Covent Garden and actress who lived in the area and has a building on Sloane Avenue named after her. Few people have noticed the fountain in Sloane Square is decorated with images of Charles II and Nell Gwyn rapturously in love and feeding each other grapes. Charles II had many lovers and sadly no legitimate children with his wife the Portuguese Princess Catherine of Braganza. In order to pass through the toll gates to Chelsea, you would have needed to be an associate or friend of the Royals, and to show a coin to pass through. Many aristocrats moved and lived in this area, particularly towards the late 19th century many developments with private garden squares to lure them in. These garden squares (accessible with a private key), hoped to prevent the ill health that plagued the poor in East London. There was no understanding of germ theory, instead people believed that bad smells caused illness (miasma). As a consequence, Chelsea is a very green borough with lots of garden squares in order for air to circulate. ​

An example of the coins used to grant access to the private King's Road

Part II coming.