This mid-Victorian terrace was built on the old glebe lands owned by the vicars of St. Mary Abbots since 1260.  A resident of the house was a survivor of the Titanic.  On that fateful night in 1912  her daughter took charge of the tiller in one of the lifeboats, steering it through the sea strewn with icebergs and debris, and did a great deal of the rowing.  The street has been the home of many artists and writers, including Percy Wyndham Lewis and Max Beerbohm, and the 20th century sculptor Georg Ehrlich lived in the house.  Physicist James Clerk Maxwell conducted his experiments in a garret a few doors down in the 1860s, to the great curiosity of passers-by.

Two flats built 1862-3 as part of three back-to-back blocks, which are now London's oldest remaining mansion flats.  It was social anathema to early and middle Victorians to share facilities such as front doors, hallways and staircases and it took another twenty years for this continental and Scottish idea to become fashionable.  The flats attracted MPs, actors, doctors, lawyers, army and naval officers, with a strong ex-colonial tendency.  From the 1930s the area has been very strongly associated with secret intelligence agencies, with many of the people working there living nearby, certainly the case with one of the flats.

The street was developed in the 1850s along part of the steeplechase track of the Hippodrome Racecourse.  At the time there was a stark contrast between the wealth of Notting Hill on one side, and Notting Dale with its piggeries and potteries on the other.  By the end of the 19th century Notting Dale became one of London's worst slums.

An early 19th century house built before the development of Barnsbury by the side of a footpath winding through open fields with grazing cows.  In the 1850s Johnston Forbes-Robertson, who later became the best Hamlet of his day, spent part of his childhood here. 

This house built in the mid-1850s is part of an imposing stuccoed terrace. Before 1800 the area was open fields leased to farms, transformed by the opening of the Paddington Arm of the Grand Junction Canal. Since then its streets have been compared to those of Amsterdam and Paris, and its canals to Venice. The first occupant of the house was the widow of a large landowner - in fact they were never married. He was described, admittedly by a political rival, as ‘a little rural tyrant’ with scenes of moral depravity at his Somerset castle. Like many of the larger properties nearby, the house became a boarding house, then bedsits.

Built c1850 in the Italianate style, the street was intended for professional residents: typically barristers, solicitors, civil engineers and doctors. The first family who lived in the house perfectly illustrates rigid Victorian class distinctions. The barrister son, supposedly single and living in the family home, turned out to have a ‘wife’ and four children living in Chelsea. As the daughter of a local cab proprietor, she would not have been considered socially suitable.

A house in north-eastern Chelsea built c1848 on the site of nursery gardens south of the old turnpike from Knightsbridge to Fulham.  First occupied by craftsmen, such as carpenters and gardeners, the immediate area by about 1920 had become a smart place to live.  Bertrand Russell, Dirk Bogarde and Alec Guiness were all residents of the street.

A late Victorian property built in response to the clamour for houses after the huge population increase of London and the introduction of cheaper rail fares in the 1870s and 1880s. The development in this area replaced several large houses built by wealthy businessmen in the early 19^th century. An early resident of the house was a member of the Watney brewing family and a keen motor racing amateur.

A Grade II house built in the 1860s. Originally intended as a southern Belgravia, Pimlico was constructed over the marshlands at great expense by Thomas Cubitt. It was always socially tricky owing to the railway and the great bulk of Millbank Penitentiary next door. The house veered from decades of multi-occupation to some eminent residents later in its history.

 house built c1880, in a street mainly occupied by people working for the railways.  A poignant story emerged of a railway signalman who lost his job and in his late fifties became a coal miner in Nottinghamshire.  The house was built near the site of Bartholomew Rocque’s nursery (a florist of considerable reputation, and the brother of John Rocque, the famous 18th century land surveyor of London).