Bohemia by the Thames

Chelsea. Bohemia by the Thames. A haven for artists and radicals, painters and poets. London’s most fashionable, artistic and hedonistic neighbourhood. That’s what it says in all the tourist guide books, anyway. It’s a bit different if you actually live here.

The real Chelsea is a schizophrenic melting pot, an endlessly fascinating and frustrating place where the rich and the infamous live alongside the weird and the not-so-wonderful. Yes, it’s inspired artists from Bram Stoker to Bob Marley (he wrote ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ in a one bed-roomed flat off Cheyne Walk). Yes, the mini skirt and punk were invented here. Yes, it’s hedonistic, a bubbly-drinking bubble where Sloane Rangers bray in The Admiral Codrington pub and Roman Abramovich’s millionaire footballers park their baby Bentleys where they please. But there’s more to it than that.

For a start it’s also an elitist enclave, a network of grand squares and mews where the English upper classes rub shoulders with American investment bankers and Russian oligarchs. There are days when, I swear, you can smell the money.

It’s also home to some of London’s finest period buildings, one of England’s oldest and best libraries, the groundbreaking Royal Court Theatre, the Chelsea Pensioners, Chelsea Bridge, the Chelsea Bun and the world’s most famous flower show. Nothing too Bohemian about any of those.

But it’s also a place that’s filled with all human life – and some inhuman life too.


A Village of Palaces

It was – who else? – Henry VIII who first gave the sleepy, riverside backwater that was Chelsea ideas above its station. Until the Tudor party animal moved into the Manor House in what was once known as Cealc-ho – old English for chalk wharf – the place was more commonly associated with limestone than limelight.

Henry changed all that. He held court in Manor House where he set up two of his wives – Catherine Parr and Anne of Cleves. He also persuaded his closest confidantes to live nearby. There‘s a statue to one of them there still, by the river on Cheyne Walk. Thomas More, the Man for All Seasons, who got the chop for questioning the King‘s marital habits. He might have been the first, but he was by no means the last man to lose his head over a woman in Chelsea.

Take Charles II, the monarch who more than any other turned Chelsea into a posh enclave. In 1694, egged on by his lover Nell Gwynne, he built the Royal Chelsea Hospital then laid out his own, private thoroughfare stretching from St James’ Palace to Fulham. The King’s Road has been synonymous with decadence ever since. By the turn of the 17th century 3,000 people lived in what was described as a “village of palaces“ although even then it was clear that the eastern end of Chelsea was the more rarefied part of the neighbourhood. As one historian put it “the better residential portion of Chelsea is the eastern, near Sloane Street and along the river; the western, extending north to Fulham Road is mainly a poor quarter”.

The rich attract artists like dung attracts beetles. (Or is that the other way round?) As the village of palaces expanded in the 18th and 19th centuries, so Europe’s most talented and ambitious artists starting colonising Chelsea.

JMW Turner lived in a flat overlooking the Thames on Davis’s Place although no one knew him as England’s greatest artist. Apparently the locals called him Admiral Booth.

Most artists couldn’t afford to live on the most expensive streets, like the Embankment and Cheyne Walk. Instead many set themselves up in places like Tite Street, where there was plenty of cheap studio accommodation.

It soon became a haven for not just painters but writers and poets too. Jane Austen spent time in Chelsea, apparently, as did Henry James and Bram Stoker. It was the painters who contributed most to the area’s Bohemian reputation though, in particular, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and a group of others who together formed the 19th century’s most colourful movement, The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

The area’s Bohemian reputation faded by the end of the 19th century, although there were a few who kept the flag flying. Among those who lived and worked in Chelsea were Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde, who also lived in Tite Street, until his louche lifestyle landed him in gaol.

In 1891, the artist James McNeill Whistler established the Chelsea Arts Club on Old Church Street. The Arts Club has remained a bastion of artists, poets and filmmakers ever since, famous for its extravagant annual ball. For the best part of 50 years it maintained Chelsea’s Bohemian reputation alone. For a while it looked like the area’s spirit was flagging, but then the 1960s arrived. Suddenly Chelsea became the epicentre of Swinging London – and the fashionable world.


The Hippest Street in the World

“The King’s Road is a wilderness of stoned harlequins.“
- Christopher Gibbs, antique dealer.

In the mid 1950s, a community of bright and ambitious young designers, artists, film directors and socialites descended on the King’s Road. By now, the famous street had an air of faded grandeur about it. The Chelsea Set, as the group became known in the media, put the neighbourhood back on the map.

At the Sloane Square end of the King’s Road, John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, launched at the Royal Court Theatre in 1956, summed up the energy of the moment. But it was down the other end of the road, in fashion designer Mary Quant’s surreal, slightly chaotic boutique, Bazaar, that the real revolution was brewing.

Quant’s windows were filled with a wacky, eclectic mix of clothes and jewellery, much of it made by local art students. Among her creations was the skirt that was to symbolise the next decade, the mini.

“Snobbery has gone out of fashion, and in our shops you will find duchesses jostling with typists to buy the same dresses,” Quant said as things took off. She was dead right. The Chelsea Set revolutionised the way women – and men – shopped. The duchesses and typists were soon jostling all the way along the King’s Road.

By the early 1960s a wave of new fashion graduates and artistic wannabes had washed in to the area, attracted by the area’s mix of low rents and high living. Almost overnight the old fishmongers and greengrocers were transformed into new boutiques, each one with a more outrageous shop window than the next.

Suddenly a trip down the King’s Road became a statement of self-expression. On Saturdays, trendy Londoners mixed with pop aristocrats like the Rolling Stones, who lived on Cheyne Walk. Chelsea even had the nation’s trendiest football team. Pin-ups like Peter Osgood, Alan Hudson, Charlie Cook and Peter Bonetti added to the neighbourhood’s celebrity.

By 1968, the King’s Road had become the Hippest Street in the World.

At its epicentre was the coolest place in the capital, The Chelsea Drugstore, which opened in July that year. Inspired by Le Drugstore, an ultra hip Parisian hangout on the Boulevard St Germain, the Drugstore boasted bars, food stores, a chemist, record shop and – of course – boutiques, all spread over three floors. The Drugstore was open 16 hours a day, seven days a week. London had seen nothing like it – nor has it since.

It even had a “flying squad” home delivery service where drop dead gorgeous girls in purple catsuits would run your groceries round on their motorbikes. If I ever bump into Dr Who, I’d get him to take me and the Tardis back there.

The Drugstore made The King’s Road even more fashionable, drawing yet more bright young things. One of them, a bolshy young fashion designer, Vivienne Westwood and her partner Malcolm McLaren, opened up a shop near the World’s End. Its name said everything about their attitude to life and fashion. It was called simply Sex. By the mid-70s, the shop had even created a musical movement, Punk. For the next few yeas, sales of safety pins, distressed leather and drainpipes went through the stratosphere. Tourists trekked to Chelsea and the King’s Road to capture the spiky-haired spawn the devilish McLaren and Westwood produced. The band that was born at their shop, the Sex Pistols, terrified – and conquered – the world.

In the end, inevitably, the King’s Road fell victim to the thing that had made it famous – fashion. By the 1980s, the punk movement had been consigned to history and the Goths and new Romantics were heading off to Notting Hill and Kensington for their clothes and their kicks. The only tribe that was left were the Sloane Rangers, the upper crust Hooray Henrys and Henriettas personified by Prince Charles’ bride-to-be Lady Diana Spencer. The Sloanes spent Daddy’s trust fund money in pubs like the Admiral Codrington and – at the other end of the neighbourhood – the White Horse (The Sloaney Poney) in Parson’s Green. Their rise marked the final fall of Chelsea as a little oasis of Bohemian life in what had, after all, always been a rich man’s playground.

Today the King’s Road is more Cartier, Graff and Gucci than Sex and Bazaar. Once more the money is at the Sloane Square end while Fulham is left to the “poor”. There is even a new breed of Sloane Ranger to spend it all. The potential daughters-in-law that Diana never saw, Prince William’s girlfriend Kate Middleton and Prince Harry’s on-off lover Chelsy Davy, are the new leaders of the set.

At nightclubs like Raffles and Bouji they mingle with Chelsea’s new monarchs, Didier Drogba, John Terry and Frank Lampard and the rest of Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich’s millionaire football team. The kings of Stamford Bridge have restored Chelsea to its status as a playground for the rich and powerful. It’s as if Henry VIII had never gone away.

Everything and nothing has changed. Kind of sums Chelsea up really.

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