Hot on the heels of some wonderful photographs of our area, Mik Laver has also provided a fascinating article on the architecture which appeared around St Petersburgh Place following the Blitz. Below are the first three paragraphs of the introduction and three of the included images. To read the whole article as a PDF file please follow this link.
Mik Laver writes:
London’s “classic” domestic architecture, built mostly by nineteenth-century property speculators, suffered severe damage during the Blitz. Postwar reconstruction by twentieth-century property speculators was barely constrained by urban planners, who at the time saw ageing multi-occupied Victorian housing as slums for clearance, not an architectural heritage for conservation.
So London’s vernacular domestic architecture often includes infill developments built on bombsites, which can be in stark contrast to the traditional architecture surrounding them.
I document this with contemporary photographs of eight blitz bombsites near St Petersburgh Place, Bayswater. Bayswater was rapidly developed in the mid-1850s, entirely by property speculators. They typically built grand stuccoed houses that were only briefly fashionable before transitioning to multi-occupation. These were then often very poorly maintained and by the 1950s appeared ripe either for redevelopment or for exploitation by the area’s notorious slum landlords.
Sample Images
These show a map of the eight bombsites referenced in the article, plus images of 28-30 Chepstow Place and 13-15 St Petersburgh place.
