Oakfield Street, A Brief History & Residents of Oakfield Street

Oakfield Street, a Brief History.

The six terraced houses on either side of Oakfield Street were built in 1865-66 by William Corbett and Alexander McClymont to the designs of George and Henry Godwin. These builders and architects were responsible for the majority of the 1,110 houses together with two churches and five pubs that were built on the land between the Fulham and Old Brompton Roads.

They started with the church of St. Mary The Boltons in 1849, at a cost of £3,000. Then during the 1850’s built the Boltons and Little Boltons in a classic stucco Italianate style. Then proceeded south to include Cathcart Road and Oakfield Street. In the early 1870’s they built Redcliffe Square in a more ornate French style. The builders then went spectacularly bankrupt in 1875 to the tune of £1.5 million, partially due to the cost of building St. Lukes, Redcliffe Square.

Incidentally the architect George Godwins main claim to fame was, from 1844 to 1888, as editor of the influential magazine The Builder; “The Illustrated Weekly Magazine for Architect, Engineer, Archeologist, Constructor and Art Lover.”

Reference to the area goes back to 1430, sixty years before Columbus discovered America, when it was known as Great Coleherne. This name continues to this day in the form of Coleherne Court, a large block of flats that were built in 1903 on the site of a senenteen century country house, Coleherne House. The flats are on the corner of Redcliffe Road and The Old Brompton Road., en route to Earls Court Tube station.

In the sixteenth century the area belonged to the Manor of Earls Court, whose Manor house was only finally demolished to make way for the Tube station of the same name. In the seventeenth century the land was subdivided into enclosures, predominately for market gardens to feed the booming city of London, some five miles to the east.

In 1660, the year of the restoration of King Charles II and six years before the Great Fire of London, the land on which Oakfield Street was built was owned by the Boevey family who owned a country house just to the south of Oakfield where 240-48 Fulham Road now stands. During this period the area was very much outer suburb in character with substantial houses on the Fulham Road. The area was refered to as Little Chelsea, as distinct from Chelsea with its “Village of Palaces” along the banks of the River Thames. In 1746 the land and house was owned by the Earls Verney.

Incidentally Little Chelsea had its own gibbet or gallows which stood on the south side of Fulham Lane opposite the end of Walnut Tree Walk, now known as Redcliffe Gardens. In 1765 the Reverend Scott recorded that a Chelsea Pensioner was hanged for the murder of a man called Knight, whose body remained there for some years and was refereed to as a tassel. At the other end of Redcliffe Gardens, at the junction of Old Brompton Road, a car crash involving Tara Browne inspired the Beatle John Lennon, a friend, to write “A day in the life”. “I read the news today, about a lucky man who made the grade. He blew his mind out of his car. He didn’t know the lights had changed”. This is according to Roger George Clark in his book “Chelsea Today”.

In the 1770’s the house and land was purchased by Lewis Lochee, a Brabanter from Brussels, who converted it into a private military academy and riding school. In 1784 a famous ballon ascent was made from the academy by Blanchard and Sheldon, they reached Romsey in Hampshire. Lochee died in 1791 in rather mysterious circumstances when involved in the independence movement to liberate Brabant from the Austrians. His death was recorded in the June 1791 issue of The gentleman’s Magazine thus; At Lille, in Flanders, lewis Lochee Esq., late Lieutenant Colonel of the Belgic Lion, and former keeper of the Royal Military academy at Chelsea.

The leasehold of the land was acquired from Lochee in 1784 by James Gunter who was a successful Mayfair confectioner with a shop in Berkeley Square. His son Robert steadily purchased plots and, in 1836, the freehold and by 1850 he had “land assembled” some 93 acres. It was his two sons, Robert and James who, on their return from the Crimean War, started the development program.

The houses were built for the growing middle class family market. Details from the census of 1871 and 1881 show families with servants Though by 1891 the area seems to have slipped a bit with “actresses” and a lodging house. In the 1950’s many of the houses were converted into flats and bedsits. Your host had a flat round the corner in the swinging sixties. However many of these are now being reconverted back into family houses. The area is now a protected conservation zone.

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Residents of 6 Oakfield Street

“Let not ambition mock their useful toil
Their homely joys and destiny obscure”

This paper is the first stage of an ongoing process based on the idea behind the book “Home, A biography of a House” by Julie Meyerson. “ The story of everyone who ever lived in our house. Its about the idea of home and how we feel about the people who have inhabited our space before us. Who inhabited the very same rooms, gazed out of the very same windows, year in and year out”. If only we could download the conversations, agonies and ecstasies, the walls have heard, and recorded perhaps in the silicates.

In 1881 Frederick Saunders, a fifty two year old builder from Devon, lived at 6 Oakfield Street with his wife Janet and three teenage children; Frederick, Catherine and Herbert. Also living with them was his brother in law, a Clerk on The Great West Railway and a nineteen year old servant Ester Parish. This information came from the Ten Year Census, which started in 1851 with 1881 the first time 6 Oakfield Street appeared. The census is still done every 10 years, and the latest one to be made available is for 1901.

In 1871, a few years after construction, 6 Oakfield Street was unoccupied. In number 1 lived a Swedish merchant, Gustaff Homsons with his English wife Charlotte. At number 2 lived a French commercial traveller James Meare, and at number 5 Arthur Veitch lived with his wife Emily. He was the son of the owner of a famous nursery , The Royal Exotic Nursery on the Kings Road.

In 1891 a 23 year old actress and widow, Bertha Graham, from Somerset lived at 6 Oakfield Street with her unmarried sister Violet Graham, and a 29 year old domestic servant Annie Martin. There is no record of an actress of this name in the Theatre Museum files. In the same year at 2 Oakfield Street there lived a 27 year old actress, Annie O’Brien, from Ireland with a female servant Sarah Carter. And at 3 Oakfield Street lived a 34 year old widow, Fanny Barrett from Weston Super Mare, living on her own means with a servant Annie Lewis.

By 1901 the character had changed, 6 Oakfield Street was occupied by Lilly Bartlett, a 40 year old lodging house keeper and widower. She had 6 lodgers; Alice Bassett a single 35 year old nurse born in Chelsea, Mary Graham a single 36 year old and living on her own means, Moira Miles, a 50 year old widowed domestic servant, Alice Whitebourn, a 30 year old widowed dressmaker, Walter Miles,a 23 year old labourer and John Fryer, a 50 year old widower, What a mixture!

The publication The Survey of London noted that by the 1850’s 75 % of Londoners were huddled together in lodging houses of one description or other. Houses were subdivided on completion to create lodging houses for multiple occupancy. The Survey went on to note that in 1871in Redcliffe Road nearby “no fewer than 26 houses were in multi occupancy, six being in the hands of lodging house keepers. In the late 1920’s and 1930’s the west side of the Road was devoted to apartments and to houses divided as studios. As will be noted below this multi occupancy character carried on through until the late 1990’s when houses began to be converted back into family houses. When the author first came to the area in the late 1960’s in was known as bed sit land with a lot of flat sharing by young people.

To return to 6 Oakfield where the source of information now changes to the Register of Electors, where the data is limited to the names of voters only. In 1906 Thomas Johnson lived there with his wife Amelia However by 1918 Amelia was living there alone, perhaps her husband had been killed in the Great War. In 1921 Amelia had two lodgers, Edwin and Gertrude Nicole. She continued to live at number 6 , with various lodgers until 1935 when David and Mary Gardiner took over the lodging house. In 1936 they had 8 lodgers. The Post Office Street Directory mentions Mrs Gardiner as having “aparts” at number 6. In 1941 the Directory has Robert Savi Hill as having “aparts”, he had been a lodger since 1936. Regarding the other houses in the street in 1931 all where in some form of multiple occupancy, for example number 2 with 7 registered occupants, or, like numbers 3 &4, split into two flats.

In 1942 the house was badly damaged by a bomb that fell in Carthcart Road, diagonally opposite, and was unoccupied until 1952 when Maurice and Marguerite Turner moved in, see envelope enclosed. However in 1955 John and Winifred Podger moved in and continued the lodging tradition until 1974, some 17 years. In that year the basement, 6a, was separated out as a single bedroom flat. Again regarding the rest of the street more of a family feel developed. In 1956 number 2 was split into two with the Tone Family and the Carr Family. Number 3 was similarly split with Mr & Mrs Rocker and Mr & Mrs Potter. In 1968 the Marquis and Marchioness of Queensbury lived at number 5. In 1972 both numbers 1 and 3 were flat sharing bed sits. It is reported that in the 1970’s an actress friend of The Duke of Edinburgh lived at number 2, she married an oil millionaire but sadly committed suicide, putting her head in the gas oven. The other well known person is Sarah Furgerson , the Duchess of York who lived in the street in the 1980’s , and was known as “the burning bush”.

In 1974 Dr. Fred Griffiths and his wife Kathleen bought the house and lived there for the next 22 years bringing up two boys, Cecil and George. Dr. Griffiths used the ground floor as his consulting room with a waiting room in the front. At that time the ground floor was still two rooms with the kitchen beyond. I have yet to find out when the property changed from leasehold to its current freehold status, and who owned the leasehold.

By 1989 the character of Oakfield Street was changing back to the family atmosphere of the 1870’s, a one hundred and twenty year cycle. The Wilkins family were in number 3. It is still a family house with a basement flat. The Brudnell family were in number 1, and still are, Dilly and the Suzama Family were and still are at number 5, The Griffith Family left number 6 in 1996, to be replaced by us, the de Mare family.

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