A house built in 1851-2 in a street greatly disrupted by the arrival of the Metropolitan and District Railway in 1864, leading to the compulsory purchase and demolition of eight of its newly-built houses.

Residents in the 20th century included Colonel Spring Robert Rice who had recently returned from the Boer War, where he was credited with designing a simple and inexpensive blockhouse, which was adopted by Lord Kitchener for the protection of his railway communications and saw extensive use.  Others were the chairman and managing director of H. P. Truefitt, 'hair specialists' of Old Bond Street and, in the 1930s, zoologist Terence Morrison-Scott.  He later became Director of the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum.

This house, built in 1913, was one of the last to be built in a road developed from 1860.  Adapting traditional styles for a modern era, Edwardian suburban houses such as these were seen as the perfect combination of old and new.  The cluttered and stuffy interiors of Victorian homes were replaced with airy and more manageable spaces, typically featuring a large hallway accessing the main rooms while still incorporating the staircase.  Large windows made the most of the front and back gardens.

A resident here in the late 1940s was Eunice Gayson, an up-and-coming young actress, best remembered as the first 'Bond Girl' in Dr. No.

Built from the 1870s, this square was one of the first large 19th-century developments in London to abandon stucco for red brick.  This house, designed for a single family, remained much as built until 1950.  The first owner was Francis Carr-Gomm, lately retired from the Madras Civil Service, who as chairman of the London Hospital in Whitechapel, raised funds for the support of the 'Elephant Man'.  Other residents were the 2nd Baron Belper and the 8th Earl of Darnley.  Lady Avebury, widow of the first Baron, bought the house in 1919 - running it with an indoor staff of fourteen - and it remained in the same family until 1949.

The house was then converted to flats and maisonettes.  Residents have since included the actress Moira Lister and her husband Vicomte d'Orthez, interior decorator Mary Fox-Linton, Riccardo Mazzucchelli and Ivana Trump, and Michael Bloomberg.

This house was built in 1863.  An early resident was civil engineer and contractor, Sir John Jackson, who was responsible for the foundations of Tower Bridge in London.  He also achieved what most engineers considered impossible: he built the railway over the Andes from Arica in Chile to La Paz in Bolivia.

A resident in the 1920s was David Carnegie, Earl of Northesk, a renowned sportsman and Cresta run record breaker.  He had recently married a dancer from Buffalo, but the marriage was short lived, with the young earl's drunken escapades frequently reported in the press.  Hylda Wertheimer, famously painted with her family in a series of twelve portraits by John Singer Sargent, was here in the 1930s.

Actress June Whitfield lived in a flat at the house in the 1950s.

The fifth house I've researched in this lovely street built in the 1720s.  Three sisters living here in 1773 were targeted by burglars.  The thieves were soon apprehended when they attempted to sell the silver and jewellery and, with their accomplices, were taken before the 'Blind Beak' Sir John Fielding.  They were hanged at Tyburn, their crime considered particularly heinous as the victims were unmarried ladies.

Ethel Magill, a physician, lived here from 1916, after she had taken charge of the busy X-ray department of the Endell Street Military Hospital.  She was an enthusiastic champion of massage and electrotherapy, which helped men with paralyzed limbs to regain movement and amputees to adapt to their artificial limbs.

A house built in c.1837, originally without its mansard storey.  By the middle of the 19th century it had become a lodging house which it was to remain, for the most part, until 1920.  Interesting lodgers included Major Reginald Wymer, a military illustrator, and Sibyl Marchioness of Queensberry, who spent part of the First World War at the house.  Her son Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas was best known as the lover of Oscar Wilde.

General Sir Desmond Fitzpatrick lived here in the late 1960s while he was Vice Chief of the General Staff.  A later resident was the author, journalist and film writer Alan Hyman.

The first occupant of this house, built in c.1721, was Lewis Way, a barrister and South Sea Company director.  Other 18th century residents included a Commander of the Lord Camden, one of the great East Indiamen which plied the trade routes between London, the Indian subcontinent, the East Indies and the Chinese port of Canton.

The painter Clare 'Tony' Atwood had a studio at the house from 1916, and it was also home to several actors after the First World War.  The Nation & Athenaeum, chaired by John Meynard Keynes and described as 'the mouthpiece of Bloomsbury liberalism', was published from here in the 1920s.  Its literary editor was Leonard Woolf, who would help impecunious young authors, including Robert Graves and E. M. Forster he knew through the Hogarth Press by commissioning them to write reviews and articles.

Belgravia was one of London's most fashionable residential districts from the start and until the Second World War remained a securely upper-class address.  This house was built in c.1844 by Thomas Cubitt and has been home to a son of Lord Penrhyn as well as a wealthy racehorse owner and breeder.  From 1936 it was owned by the 2nd Lord Pender of Cable and Wireless.  During the war the company, working with the Post Office, introduced Expeditionary Force Messages which became the key communication for soldiers sending messages home and vice versa - these messages sometimes totalling 20,000 a day.

In 1956 the leasehold was purchased by the High Authority of the Coal and Steel Community for its headquarters in the UK, and the house continued in commercial use until 2002.

A semi-detached house built in the 1840s, which for the first twenty years looked out over open fields.  Early residents included printers and stationers, manufacturer's agents and a corn factor.

By 1912 part of the rear garden and that of its neighbour had been marked out for development, and from that time the property was shared between two households.  It was later acquired by the Council and by 2000 was vacant and 'plagued by squatters'.  It was returned to private ownership

Originally intended as a southern Belgravia, Pimlico was constructed over the marshlands at great expense by Thomas Cubitt.  But the arrival of the railway ended the area's social aspirations overnight, and this house built in c.1862 was multi-occupied from the start.  The ground floor was used as a tobacconist's shop from the early 1870s until 1941, with up to twenty-five people living on the upper storeys and in the basement.  A resident in 1911 was magical comedian and music hall artiste Fred Culpitt, who later became the first magician to appear on a regularly scheduled television programme in England.  Another in the early 1920s was a Regimental Sergeant Major who had been shot in the leg at the Siege of Sidney Street.

From the late 1950s the district became increasingly 'gentrified', and residents of the house included film producer Timothy Burrill and Baron von Distler, who was the unfortunate target of a violent burglary in 1969.  The raiders made off with valuable antiques and three diamond and emerald rings, worth £3,000, wrenched from his fingers.