Located in a petite pocket in the northeast corner of Greater Kennington we find ourselves in the charming West Square. This almost totally intact Georgian square was imagined at the end of the 18th century by developers keen to capitalise on the trend of middle class people escaping the grime and crime of places such as Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia. And while the original occupants might have been escaping the Big Smoke, the smoke quickly enveloped them and three addresses span this crucial transition.
#14
At 14 lived Irish artist Robert Barker and family. Barker heralded the late Georgian/Victorian craze for panoramic paintings and created a rotating panorama in a custom made rotunda in Leicester Sq. This pre-cinematic, virtual reality pleasure palace gave folks the feeling that they were on a train or steamboat as the painting moved. These circular paintings depicted places such as Egypt or Oxford St. and were sometimes a mile long. So next time your best mate coerces you into going to ‘Immersive Van Gogh’ for the fifth time you have this dude’s former gaff to shake your fist at.
#39
As factories began swimming around our tranquil Square the middle class picked up sticks further south and in moved the working class, the most famous being Charlie Chaplin (we know you’re thinking -‘what he lived HERE TOO’). The Chaplins lived in three rooms in the house and Charlie’s earliest memory in was of hearing noises from the exercise area of Bethlem Lunatic Asylum, which gave us the word ‘Bedlam’ and is now the Imperial War Museum. We’ve written about life there as it reminded of current work conditions at Observer Towers. The transient nature of the Chaplin family serve as a testament to how underclass families frequently moved as they gained and lost incomes, their residence in the Square being a financial high point.
#36
Known as ‘Telegraph House’, our third home of interest relates to national security. The additional height of this home made it visible from the OId Admiralty building in Whitehall. It was therefore the perfect location to pioneer optical telegraph experiments. It acted as a relay station and could relay information from the Chatham and Deal coasts during the Napoleonic wars (1803-1815) to the Admiralty in less than thirty minutes.
As with many other edifices we’ve been writing about recently, Telegraph House was quickly the victim of Greater London urbanisation and the view to Whitehall was no more. The Admiralty addressed this by erecting what looks like a massive treehouse on top of the building; a kind of residential bouffant. By 1845 our house with its big hair was made redundant and with the invention of the telegraph the building returned to sole domestic use and the bouffant was shaved off. It was the home of Superintendents of the telegraphs until the 20th century.
Telegraph house just sold for £3.4 million, so you’ve missed your chance. However, you can always pop over with a packet of cheesie Wotsits and can of Vimto to welcome them.
