Built mainly in the 1840s on the site of nursery gardens, this street became highly fashionable after the surplus funds from the 1851 Great Exhibition helped to create the new 'South Kensington' devoted to the promotion of the arts and sciences. Early tenants included an organist and composer of sacred music, a Canadian merchant and politician, and architect T. Marsh Nelson who designed the layouts of Westbourne and Gloucester Terraces in Bayswater.
After the Second World War the house was bought by art dealer Geoffrey Houghton Brown who shared it for a year with flamboyant decorator Ronald Fleming and architectural historian James Lees-Milne. In the late 1940s it became home to author Joyce Maxtone Graham who under her pen name Jan Struther created the enormously popular 'Mrs. Miniver'. Neighbours in the 1990s included Anthony Hopkins.