NORLAND - AN “OUTSTANDING CONSERVATION AREA”(Lecture given 1999 by Clive Wilson and Gordon Michell – thirty years on)

As all of us who live here know, the Norland area is unique, - for its relative calm, its spaciousness, the grand layout of its streets, crescents and squares, its fine architecture, and yet its informality, sense of neighbourhood and villagey-ness, the almost rural charm of its squares, its ease of parking (for many - though not all), and the convenience of its local shops, unfortunately now considerably fewer than when the Norland Conservation Society was founded 30 years ago.

Norland’s uniqueness was recognised at a very early stage by the Powers-that-be in Conservation - such as they were, despite its rather raffish, “left bank” character, and some pretty strange goings-on, that would put off many of our newer neighbours, but did not, in those days deter hardy would-be Norlanders such as

In the early 50’s, Marj Holmes, newly married, arrived to take a look at No 54 St James’s Gardens. The chauffeur took one look and wouldn’t let her get out of the car. Nevertheless, in due course, she and Robin Holmes of BBC fame, did move in there, paying £2500 for the freehold.

The fronts of many of the houses were peeling, the cornices prone to collapse in to the street during rain storms, the wall plates were riddled with dry-rot, and rear wals threatened to fall backwards into gardens. Of course, this was still a result of the war. Mterials for repair were hard to come by. You had to get a licence to spend money on renovating a house. It was a luxury to find a piece of lino… remember what that was?

A little later on, No 52 St James’s Gardens was dedicated to the manufacture of pin-ball tables.

In the early 60’s, Norland Square was pretty down-market, not a place to bring up a family, all sub-divided into one-room flats with a very wide cross-section of undesirable types living there, - some with a red light outside.

Right through the 60’s, 2 houses in St James’s Gardens were owned by an extraordinary tramp, a former builder, who was, well, one might call him a “compulsive collector”, called Mr Bircher . Mr Bircher himself lived in a tumbledown neo-classical pedimented house in Princes Place with a large stock of iron railings that he offered to sell to the likes of us, faced with a St James’s Gardens house with most of its railings missing (presumably removed by the same gentleman during the war, when London railings were enlisted for bullet making). As soon as anyone moved into a house with railings missing, he mysteriously turned up and volunteered to “find some”.

Even in the 70’s, No 1 St James’s Gardens was fenced off as a dangerous structure, because its wealthy owner, a lady in her 90’s, lived in leisure somewhere on the South coast, and refused either to sell - for reasons of sentimental attachment - or to repair - for reasons of economy.

Talk to any of the long-standing residents of Norland, Betty Anderson, in her 90’s, Mrs Baldock, a 60 years resident of Wilsham Street, Janet Pott, who died in February aged 95…

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one of the things that is so nice about Norland is that people get their roots down and stay here - and they will be able to regale you with so many stories. Both Betty Anderson and Janet Pott were born in Norland and lived here all their lives.

Anyway, following the 1967 Civic Amenities Act, a few imaginative and far-sighted souls at Kensington Council took it into their heads to designate the Norland Area as the first Conservation Area in the Royal Borough, in January 1969.

The Department of the Environment went further, and confirmed Norland as an “outstanding Conservation Area”.

But what did it all mean?

It’s hard to realise and remember today that thirty years ago, this was all that had happened.

Nobody knew what a Conservation Area was meant to be (cartoon).

Only the initiated members of the Planning Committee, and the Officers of the Planning Department were aware of the 1967 Civic Amenities Act, which required Councils to designate Conservation Areas.

Otherwise we all pursued our lives in ways that left the preservation of attractive parts of London (and specifically Norland) completely at the mercy of individual, personal judgement, - with extremely little planning control.

Then - brief history of development of Norland based on Survey of London (map of Norland Estate 1846 from Policy Statement)

This is where it all started (Map of Kensington in 18C). Here’s Kensington Place, (with a brick kiln occupying what is now Millionaires’ Row). There’s Nottting Hill Gate (Kensington Gravel Pits)… And Holland House, in the middle of Holland Park.

And here, slightly to the North and West, is what looks like 18th Century allotments – Mr Green’s. And Mr Green’s is where we all now live.

Mr Green had bought North Lands Farm early in the 18th Century, and built himself a house called Norland House (on the site of the present 130 Holland Park Avenue). The road to the east of Mr Green’s was known as Green’s Lane – a very ancient by-way, now known as Pottery Lane. It changed its name in the first quarter of the 19th Century, when potteries and a brick field were established at the north end of the lane, which had originally led to Notting Barns Farm. (Photograph – Barbara Denny p96)

In 1761, the house and land (52 acres in all) was let for use as a riding school. In 1785, this riding school became the Royal Military Academy. (Photograph Map of Academy – Barbara Denny p66)

Thomas Green’s grandson died heavily in debt in 1788, and the estate was bought by Benjamin Vulliamy, the famous watch and clock maker, (whose descendant still lived in Norland in the 1960’s.) IN 1844, Vulliamy’s son, Lewis, designed the Church of St James in St James’s Gardens.

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At about this time, just after the Napoleonic Wars, residential estates were being developed in Belgravia and north of Hyde Park. London’s relentless progress westwards too k a massive leap forwards, as speculators rushed to join the bandwagon.

And this is how it looked 70 years later (The rural parish in 1820) - not much change

The Ladbroke Estate to the East was started in 1821. At this stage, Norland was considered too far west.

This is how it looked 80 years later (Photograph of map of 1833 – Barbara Denny p44) – not much change

But in 1836, a racecourse – The Notting Hill Hippodrome (Photograph picture) was opened, rather like a point-to-point course, on the western slope of Notting Hill. It’s a little difficult to work out which way you’re looking in this picture. My father-in-law, who collected this print, reckoned that the houses on the hill over to the right must be Campden Hill Square.

This makes sense when you look at the layout of the course on this map. (Photographs map of 1841 – Barbara Denny p 58)

Crowds made their way out of the stench of Inner London, to enjoy the refreshing air at this novel entertainment.

But it was not to last for long. The villagers of Shepherd’s Bush and Paddington had long enjoyed a Righ of Way which crossed the new race course, and ceremonially pulled down the fences at every meeting to preserve it. So the Hippodrome had to cease operations.

But the taste for fresh air to the west had caught on sufficiently to give Vulliamy the opportunity to sell the Norland Estate to a solicitor called Charles Richardson in 1839, for the princely sum of £19,990.

Richardson’s architect, robert Cantwell, followed the clear neo-classical layout used earlier by Nash in Regent’s Park and Wood in Bath, with picturesque crescents and squares, and long straight wide intersecting streets (Map of Norland Estate 1846 – Photograph map)

This was Royal Crescent in the 1850’s

And here’s Addison Avenue at much the same time

But the development was not a success: there simply was not enough demand for houses to meet the enormous speculative supply. Richardson ran out of money, and little more of interest is known until after the last war. (NB Neighbourhood Plan will include more history)

So what waas the situation in 1969?

- Conservation Area designated - the listed buildings are highlighted in red(slide of “red” map showing listed buildings)

- Heavy through traffic through Clarendon Cross - 600 vehicles an hour of all types. (This photograph actually shows Clarendon Cross just after the temporary closure was put in place in 1970

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- Harrison Homes - recent planning application for demolition of E end of St JG (Slide of refurbished houses just completed)(The Harrison Homes’ application to replace the East end of the square with a five-storey red brick neo-georgian block of one-roomflats was only defeated by Graham Hughes, from No 16, putting in an application to demolish his own house, and build a multi-storey carpark on the site)

- Houses neglected to extreme (Slide of No 1 St JG)- Princes Place, which used to consist of charming cottages, with real cottage gardens

full of dahlias and sprouts, much valued by their Housing Trust tenants, was unfortunately so “gerry-built” that the houses were quite beyond re-habilitation and doomed (slide)

- Norland Road in ruins (slide) (Photograph from p22 of Policy Statement)- Royal Crescent and Norland Square - extensive multiple occupation, multiple colour

schemes, many in poor repair with cornices missing (slide + photograph pictures from album): a far cry from the magnificent vision of the Victorian architects (make slides from 2 photos in records)

- Rachman-like Property speculators (Slide Royal Crescent + slides from photos in album) were taking every opportunity to milk the property they could get hold of, by extending their accomodation for rent:- building out over rear gardens, thus intruding on valuable open space, and taking light from next door houses- raising rooflines and adding extra floors (which were no doubt splendid inside, but screamingly inappropriate from the outside, and spoilt the character of the roofscape) - take photodeveloping “creeping” hotels to exploit the shortage of hotel rooms in London. These were conversions (for instance in Royal Crescent) into single rooms with bathroom and kitchenette, only let for a night or two at a time, thereboy depriving longer-term residents of accommodation

- Council tower block developments (slide)- No control over window or facade designs (anything was allowed)- Addison Avenue (slide of original vision)

- cars parked everywhere (no Residents Parking in existence yet) - slide- no restrictions on front garden car parking (slide of cartoon): with Residents’ Parking Control threatened, lots of people in Addison Avenue were threatening to take down their front garden wall, and turn it into a parking space

- No less than 5 hotels threatened round the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout to give over 3000 rooms-- Gov’t grant £1000 per room to stimulate hotel bulding in London- Excellent communications promised by West Cross Route/Holland Park Ave

interchange - a magnet for hotel developers- What is now the Hilton was to have had a 290ft tower- Proposed Holiday Inn just across the West Cross route was to have been 100

yards wide and 100 yards high- threat to light as well as traffic- Kensington Council no policies about hotels so close to, but outside, a

Conservation Area- Hammersmith Council greedy for rate income- most threatening of all was the proposed development of West Cross Route

without any extension North to take the traffic on where it wanted to go. We were terrfied it would all find its way through Norland and Clarendon Cross

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- of course none of the Square Gardens had their railings, as originally intended: chain link was the only means of securing privacy for the residents, once the railings had been removed during the war to make bullets (Take picture of ugly wire netting)

- a lot of the houses had gaping holes in their railings, where they had been removed during the war by a tramp who owned two houses in St James’s Gardens, which he let out to sitting tenants, while he lived himself for many years in a tumble-down house with a fine portico in Princes Place. As soon as anyone moved into a house with railings missing, he mysteriously turned up and volunteered to “find some”

• How the Society happened:

Such was the situation in 1969, when, as a resident of St James’s Gardens, I got heartily fed up with the noise of 600 cars, lorries and buses thundering past my front door, and up through Clarendon Cross, to get from the relatively new M4 to the M1.

My first thought was a Petition. But I soon found out that no one in Local Government reall gives much weight to a string of signatures on a piece of paper. I became convinced that organisations will onluy ever talk to other organisations, and that some sort of Association must be our way of lobbying too. So I started drumming up support for a Residents’ Association. But then I talked to Gordon Michell, and architect living on Queensdale Road, who had a lot to do with the Civic Trust. And that’s when the whole thing started to take off.

The designation of the Norland Area as an “outstanding Conservation Area” provided us with the opportunity to support the Council and the Civic Amenities Act, while turning ti to our own purposes in overcoming a wide variety of problems – of which traffic was only one, though admittedly an important one. We felt that designation of itself was not enough: though it was intedned to be a preliminary to a programme of positive action to preserve and enhance, Conservation Areas, once designated, might well be comfortably forgotten by a council which had pressing problems on its mind, and did not quite know what to do next.

With a fair collectin of willing helpers from all over the area, we invited every single one of the 1800-odd residents on the Electoral Roll to a public meeting to inaugurate the Society. We got a judge to preside to hold the peace. About 100 people turned up to give it a unanimous send-off. We signed on about 120 members the first year at 10/- a time, and – eventually, with the energetic help of our Treasurer, Ian Tegner, got ourselves registered as Charity.

Right from the start, we saw the need for Committee Members to each have specific responsibilities, - particularly

- one for reviewing Planning Applications, and bringing them to the Committee with comments on the issues they raised, and reommendations as to whaat our line should be

- one for Traffic matters, similarly developing ideas, guidelines, responses to particular issues, talking with members about issues as they arose, and always bringing proposals to the committee, rather than hoping that the meeting would somehow evolve answers

- one for trees, to ensure that the best trees in the area were protected, and that replacement or additional planting took place

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- one for Public Relations- one as Membership Secretary

Otherwise the Chairman gets landed with doing everything! And, as the first Chairman, Gordon was our source of inspiration and guidance, - he certainly did not want to do everything himself!

Actually, this structure was particularly important because, at that stage particularly, the powers over planning, traffic etc were so diffuse, ill-defined, and spreaad amongst so many different bodies; and policies were non-existant or ill-defined at best.

This posed us lots of problems, but Gordon’s extensive experience and knowledge of Urban Conservation thinking helped us to become recognised (together with Ladbroke) as leaders in developing Conservation Area policies. And this was such an important feature of those pioneering days.

You see, everyone was grappling to understand what a Conservation Area meant. Lots of different bodies felt they ouight to have a say, and to be doing something about it, but there were no policies, and no one really had much of an idea as to how to develop policies and guidelines, or what their role should be in developing them. It had to be done on the hoof, on a case by case basis.

Gordon’s knowledge of the possibly interested parties from his work with the Civic Trust and on European Architectural Heritage Year meant that, when we had to move something in the right direction, he often knew the right person to make thngs happen.

It all sounds a bit machiavellian, but it wasn’t. It was actually solid slogging hard graft, and our meetings frequently lasted till midnight while we argued the pros and cons of the line we should take over particular issues, in order to develop policies, and get them accepted by the Council on a case-by-case basis.

And, as Gordon has said, the original draft of Norland Regained took 12 years to become the Council’s agreed Conservation Area Policy Statement.

So, though Gordon was the original inspiration behind many of the policies we developed, all the members of the Committee during the first 12 years of our existence played a part in developing our thinking and the policies included in the Policy Statement.

So what could we say have been our Successes:

- Traffic: Clarendon Cross closure: there is no doubt that, at one stroke, this closure did more to protect the peace and calm and character of Norland than anything else. Amazingly, with the perspective of hindsight, there was actually a strong movement to get it re-opened, and this was only warded off by one vote in the Committee threatened re-opening only warded off by one vote (Slide)

- Of the 5 Hotels: only one went ahead, and that with much more modest proportions than the original proposals

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- The parking in Addison Avenue was eventually agreed as it is to allow an uninterrupted view up the centre of the Aveneu. And thanks to energetic canvassing by the Street Representative, all but one of the House-owners signed a petition to the Council asking for front garden parking to be banned

- After many, many applications, policy guidelines ere agreed and are now followed for judging applications for Roofline extensions and rear garden developments

- When you look at those photographs of how Royal Crescent looked with all the different colour schemes, and the sa state of the houses thirty years ago, it is hard to imagine why it should have been such a struggle to get agreement to the unified decorations scheme. Fortunately, European Architectural Heritage Year gave the incentive and helped to fund the scheme; and it was the energy of Architects Alan and Sylvia Blanc in selling the scheme to all the owners that really made it happenRoyal Cescent - European Architectural Year

- After much debate, guidelines were also agreed as to how to judge Window and facade designs/proposals

- It would be wrong for the Society to claim credit for the Railings in St James’s Gardens and Royal Crescent. But I do believe the strength of feeling about conserving Norland was a considerable moral support and encouragement

I guess actually one of the most important successes has been:

- the way we have learnt to work with, and influence, the various authorities, taking advantage of knowledge of legislation and their respective powers and interests

- Development of comprehensive set of guidelines for judging suitability of proposals, which were then incorporated in the Norland Conservation Area Policy Statement approved by the Council (a copy of the policy summary is available for those interested, after the meeting)

Not-so-successes:

- Princes Place – a very utilitarian, fairly ugly lump at the heart of an Outstanding Conservation Area (even if it did somehow manage to win some sort of prize)

- The fact that we have not been able to find a way to eliminate or reduce through traffic on Royal Crescent, St Anne’s Villas, and through Norland Square

Conclusions:

The last thirty years have proven the value of an active grass-roots society in preserving and enhancing their own small parts of London, - and particularly the vital role the NCS plays in maintaining and enhancing the character of Norland.

It’s not easy, it all requires a lot of dedicated hard work and continual vigilance, - not just by a Committee, but by everyone living in the area who loves it and wants to keep its unique charm.

Example: The latest major battle concerns the mosque at 20 Penzance Place. The Islamic Universal Association submitted proposals for a major redevelopment and extension of the mosque disguised as 20 Penzance Place.

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Anyone who casually inspected the Planning Register could have been forgiven for not taking much notice of what seemed to be relatively harmless proposals for a private house.

But fortunately Mrs Davies and Mrs Tracy were more vigilant, and alerted the Committee. As a result, the active involvement of members of the Society, the St James’s Gardens Garden Committee, and local residents resulted in over 100 individual letters, all with their own very personal points of view, written to the Council to object.

This proposal contravenes many of the principles developed over the past thirty years and incorporated in the Norland Conservation Area Policy Statement approved by the Council, and in the Urban Development Plan.

But having seen in the case of the V&A spiral, (without a strong and vociferous body of local opinion, and the strong, well-informed representations of a Society such as the NCS), how the Council can override such considerations, you can see how important it is for the future of where you live, that everyone gets involved, in addition to the representations of a grass-roots Conservation Society, such as ours.

It’s amazing the number of people who blithely assume that “the Council” looks after those things, they “know best”. They certainly do their best. We value their support and the kind of relationship that we have built up with both Officers and Members. They depend very much on us for guidance as to the development of local policies, and the Society has become very well respected for the sober judgement and wise counsels we have been able to give. The results are only too evident when you compare the wa the area is today with the photographs I was able to show you of the way it was 30 years ago.

Norland Regained – it is a Thirty Year success story, and it is up to all of us to make sure it carries on to 40, 50, and on…

Please go out and proselytise to get more members, and if you are interested, please ask Robin Price how you can personally get more involved with the work of the Society.

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