Knightsbridge

“ The wheels became less, and the feet more, frequent. The streets were thronged, and in a misty, half-unconscious way she realised for the first time the enormous magnitude of London. We are told one half the world does not know how the other half lives. One half of London has never seen the district in which the other half dwells.
It was a matter of perfect indifference to her which way she went, so long as it was not to Knightsbridge. Of course going towards Knightsbridge meant nothing; for when one takes a step due north, one is going towards the North Pole. ”

“ Forty years since, there was neither draper’s nor butcher’s shop between Hyde Park Corner and Sloane Street, and only one in the whole locality where a newspaper could be had, or writing paper purchased. There was no conveyance to London but by a kind of stagecoach; the roads were dimly lighted by oil, [30] and the modern paving only to be seen along Knightsbridge Terrace. ”

“ No place in the kingdom exists but must have some story to tell; and if it cannot show a castle built by Cæsar, and battered down by Cromwell, recourse must be had elsewhere for such. Well, then, our legend tells, that in some ancient time certain knights had occasion to go from London to wage war for some holy purpose: light in heart, if heavy in arms, they passed through Knightsbridge on their way to receive the blessing awarded to the faithful by the Bishop at Fulham. ”

“ In the Confessor’s charter the mention of “the wood at Kyngesbyrig” gives, I consider, an index to what the state of the place was then. It doubtless formed a portion of the great forest which Fitzstephen describes as belting the metropolis. It owned no lord, and the few inhabitants enjoyed free chase and other rights in it. In 1218 it was disafforested by order of Henry III., whom we afterwards find owned lands here; and in the reign of his son, Edward I., Knightsbridge, according to Lysons, is mentioned as a manor of the Abbey. ”

“ As for Knightsbridge, if we imagine all the great modern buildings such as Sloane Court and the Barracks done away with, and picture a long unpaved road stretching away into fields and open country westward, with a few small houses of the brick box type on both sides, we get some idea of the district. Sloane Street was then in fact quite the end of London; not long before it had been dangerous to travel to the outlying village of Chelsea without protection at night, and it was not until another fourteen years had passed that the Five Fields were laid out for building. ”

“ Hobart, were to patrol along Grosvenor Place and Pimlico, to the Palace, and along Piccadilly, to communicate with the 2nd Battalion of the same regiment, and the St. Margaret’s and St. George’s Regiments. This 2nd Battalion were to patrol Sloane Street, leaving one company in Chelsea Waterworks, and to communicate with the Knightsbridge corps, who were to remain in reserve at the north end of Sloane Street.
Riots at Knightsbridge.—In those good old electioneering times, “the days when George III. was king,” our hamlet was many a time the scene of riot. ”

“ Dr. Richard Wright, F.R.S., and physician to St. George’s Hospital, died here, October 14th, 1786. J. Marshall, a botanist and gardener, and well known as a writer on such subjects, lived at Knightsbridge many years; and Edward Wakefield, author of “Ireland, Political and Statistical,” died here, May 18th, 1854, aged eighty-six. John Allen, of Knightsbridge, in 1685, left to the parish of Hammersmith 10s. annually to twenty poor people. The Countess of Yarmouth, mistress of George II., also numbered among its inhabitants.
p. 216CHAPTER IV.
BELGRAVIA.
“Belgravia! ”

“ Knightsbridge is a very old hamlet—adjacent to Hyde Park Corner and thence running westward, bounded on the north by the Park. It is supposed to have taken its name from a bridge over the Westbourne, which ran across the road previous to its falling into the Thames at Chelsea. ”

“ Knightsbridge may be described geographically as the region bounded on the north by Hyde Park, on the east by Apsley House and St. George’s Hospital, and on the west by Brompton and the cavalry barracks; on the south-east by Wilton Crescent and Lowndes Square, and on the south-west by an unknown region of misery and want. A vast tide of traffic runs through it, formed by the junction of three considerable streams. Two of these are from the west; the one rises in the distant region of Richmond and Brentford, and increases greatly in magnitude by tributaries at Hammersmith and Kensington ”

“ All now is altered—highwaymen, patrols, and mails are all gone—and the road is the best entrance into the capital. An Act, passed June 19th, 1829, placed the Great Western Road, from Knightsbridge to Brentford Bridge, under the charge of the Commissioners of Metropolitan Roads.
It was a long time before our hamlet became part and parcel of the metropolis. A letter in my possession, written by an intelligent mechanic, fresh from Gloucester, and dated August, 1783, describes it as “quite out of London, for which,” says he, “I like it the better.” ”

“ Three doors beyond is an ancient inn, now known as the “Rose and Crown,” but formerly the “Oliver Cromwell,” and which has been licensed above three hundred years. It is the oldest house in Knightsbridge, was formerly its largest inn, and not improbably the house which sheltered Wyatt, while his unfortunate Kentish followers rested on the adjacent green. A tradition told by all old inhabitants of the locality that Cromwell’s body-guard was once quartered here, is still very prevalent, and an inscription to that effect was till lately painted in front of the house ”

“ Half-way down the row, on the Knightsbridge side, you caught a glimpse of it set well back in its strip of garden with a curtain of rustling aspen-trees before the door.
Erected towards the close of the eighteenth century as a retreat for a fallen minister, it had, on his demise, become the residence of a minor member of the reigning Royal House, from whose executors, it had, in due course, passed into the hands of the first histrionic couple in the land. ”

“ Clement’s Danes, October 10th, 1676, to Sir Thomas Grosvenor. This manor devolved upon her; and on her death, January 12th, 1730, came to be the freehold property of her husband, whose descendant has been ennobled by the title of Marquis of Westminster, and is the present Lord of the Manor of Ebury.
We will now revert to Knightsbridge proper again. It anciently occupied a great deal more land than its present appearance indicates. In the reign of Elizabeth certain lands appertaining to the park were within it. ”

“ But as early as the reign of Henry I. some lands at Knightsbridge belonging to the Abbey had been aliened from it—one Godwin, a hermit at Kilburn, having given his hermitage there to three nuns; Abbot Herbert not only confirmed the grant, but augmented it with lands at Cnightebriga, [11] and a rent of thirty shillings. The charter states the land to be granted with the consent of the whole “chapter and council,” to the holy virgins of St. John the Baptist, at Kilburn, for the repose of the soul of King Edward, founder of the Abbey, “and for the souls of all their brethren and benefactors.” ”

“ The Knightsbridge barracks were among his most important undertakings, and, if they are rather imposing than beautiful, can at least be considered an honest and capable solution of a difficult problem. In collaboration with Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt he designed the garrison chapel at Woolwich. As honorary architect to the Athenæum he made important additions to the club-house, and he is also represented in London by the Adelphi Theatre, by extensive additions to the Consumption Hospital at Brompton, and by the mansion erected for Sir Dudley Marjoribanks in Park Lane. ”

“ And any butcher offending by killing within these places should be imprisoned one year: a piece of legislative wisdom our own times should imitate.
When the Kentish insurrection under Wyatt broke out against the marriage of Mary and Philip of Spain, Wyatt having vainly endeavoured to enter London by the bridge, was compelled to march to Kingston, in order to cross the Thames; arriving at Knightsbridge, he there rested his men “untyll daye,” they “being very weary with travel of that night and the daye before.” ”

“ In Grosvenor Place, and various spots in the Five Fields, similar remains have also been discovered.
The infamous Lord Howard of Escrick, on p. 35whose perjured evidence Algernon Sidney was beheaded, had a house at Knightsbridge, and it was the resort of all the desperate and unprincipled adventurers [35] who are sure to be found attached to the ranks even of the noble and high-minded in such contests as were then going on between Charles II. and the Whigs. ”

“ He walked all the way through Knightsbridge and by Hyde Park until he came to Queen's Gate. Then he turned off into the park where the road divides it from Kensington Gardens and leads over the Serpentine. It was by this time fairly dark, but the lamps were lit, and he could make out the figure of a man leaning over the bridge as he approached it, though he could determine no more than this. ”

“ Among those earnest men who at this crisis rendered genuine service to the country by their energies in this particular, was Major Robert Eyre, an officer who had seen much and real service in the American War of Independence, and elsewhere, but who had now settled down at Knightsbridge, where for years he resided, one of the most respected of its p. 38inhabitants. He offered to raise a corps in the hamlet, although it had already furnished a number of men to the regiments of the surrounding locality. His offer was accepted in the following terms:—
London, August 14th, 1803. ”

“ No ceremony could possibly be considered complete without it.”
“Am I to understand——?” said Jim, who [419] stopped with ridiculous abruptness right in the middle of his question.
“By the way, my dear fellow, I have taken the liberty of suggesting to your accomplished mother that it might help her literary career if she moved a little nearer to the center. A little flat in Knightsbridge might be a judicious investment. As you may be aware, publishers as a race are highly susceptible, and an address in Knightsbridge might favorably impress them.” ”

“ The following brief notices are considered worthy of addition to the work. In the first place, the days of the Old Chapel, with its present undignified appearance and circumscribed circle of usefulness, are numbered. It is p. 280purposed, so soon as Dr. Wilson can procure the necessary funds, some £3,000, to pull down the present ruinous edifice, and erect a structure in its stead more worthy of the present position of Knightsbridge. Seventy years ago it was a poor rural hamlet: it is now a wealthy populous district. Shall its oldest institution not keep pace with the locality? ”

“ Young Nick drove on the christening day, but this time Sir Lionel took the driver's seat, with the brown idol beside him; and I saw instantly, by the very way he laid his hand on the steering-wheel, with a kind of caress—as a horse-lover pats a beloved mare's neck—that he and the golden car were in perfect sympathy.
We were starting early, because Sir Lionel had planned a good many things for us to see before dark; but early as it was, Piccadilly and Knightsbridge were seething with traffic. Motor-'buses like mad hippopotamuses; taxi-cabs like fierce young lions; huge carts like elephants ”

“ At Knightsbridge there used to be a toll collector, but I do not recollect any toll gate. A man used to come out of a gate in the fence to collect it, about where the Bank now stands, beside it the Cannon Brewery, a large building with a cannon at the top, with the back overlooking the park. That and White’s menagerie, adjoining the Fox and Bull tavern, were pulled down, and one of the first National Exhibitions was built on the ground. ”

“ It would almost appear that our Chapel had some reputation for its irregularities in this solemnity, if we are to trust some of the pointed allusions in the literature of a bygone currency. Shadwell, in his play of “The Sullen Lovers,” published in 1668, makes Lovell say:—
“Let’s rally no longer: there is a person at Knightsbridge, that yokes all stray people together; we’ll to him, he’ll despatch us presently, and send us away as lovingly as any two fools that ever yet were condemned to marriage.” ”

“ Accordingly I and my second lay the night before at Knightsbridge privately, to avoid the being secured at London upon any suspicion; which yet we found ourselves more in danger of there, because we had all the appearance of highwaymen, that had a mind to be skulking in an old inn for one night; but this, I suppose, the people of the house were used to, and so took no notice of us, but liked us the better.” And in the “Rehearsal,” written in ridicule of Dryden, we also have an allusion to the innkeepers’ habits and characters:—“Smith: But pray, Mr. ”

“ The parish officers of St. Margaret alone beat the bounds now, and they appear always to have been strict in this duty, which, from some entries in their books, one would consider to have been a little festive occasionally:—
Henry VIII.’s corpse passed through Knightsbridge for interment at Windsor. p. 51In the St. Margaret’s books is the following entry:—
Chelsea parish includes Lowndes Square and the adjoining streets, while Kensington includes Queen’s Buildings, and a few houses in Sloane Street. ”