Little Chelsea

Little Chelsea was a hamlet, located on either side of Fulham Road, half a mile Southwest of Chelsea, London. The earliest references to the settlement date from the early 1600s, and the name continued to be used until the hamlet was surrounded by residential developments in the late 1800s.

Evidence of a settlement known by this name appears in the Kensington parish burial record for a child in 1617 and magistrates accounts of an alehouse run by Thomas Freeman in 1625. By the 1670s, the Hearth tax lists 23 buildings, of various size and quality, and the section of Fulham Road that ran through the hamlet was known as 'Little Chelsey streete'. A school was operating in 1703, and, by 1737 there were two public houses in Fulham Road, including the 'Coach and Horses' near Park Walk.

In 1811, the area's mixed character remained with:

"... weather-boarded cottages, shops, builders' premises and schools in this part of Fulham Road, but also houses occupied by wealthy retired tradesmen, rentiers and office-holders, with poplars blowing in their front gardens and the orchards and nursery-grounds of south-west Brompton behind them."

In his memoirs, journalist William Jerdan recalled his time in Little Chelsea in the early 19th century. One of his near neighbours, living 'on a very moderate scale', was the 'exiled Princess of Condé'. The Princess, Louise Adélaïde de Bourbon, lived in a cottage owned by M. Amyot, in 1815-16. Jerdan reports that she often had visits from Marie Thérèse of France, then Duchess of Angoulême, daughter of the executed Louis XVI of France, and he described seeing Marie Thérèse in the street 'dressed little better than a milkmaid, which rank indeed she resembled in her form, and walking about in thick-soled boots'.

In 1868, the National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland places 'St. George's workhouse, formerly the residence of the earls of Shaftesbury; Chelsea Park, the Pavilion, and the Goat in Boots inn, the sign of which was originally painted by Moreland' within the bounds of Little Chelsea.

In 1699, the Earl of Shaftesbury purchased a property known as 'Sir James Smith's House' in Little Chelsea, which was reported to have built by Smith in 1635. Shaftesbury added 50 foot extension into the garden to house his bedchamber and Library. In the garden itself, the Earl planted fruit trees, and 'every kind of vine'. The property was sold to Narcissus Luttrell in 1710. The parish of St George Hanover Square became owners in 1787 and converted the house and grounds into an additional workhouse for their parish poor.

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