Earls Court
Earls Court Square
Earls Court Square is on the west of Earls Court Road. It comprises a mixture of large red-brick mansion blocks and four-storey (plus basement) stucco and brick houses. There is an attractive central garden square with many mature trees. The buildings on the north side of the square are particularly imposing with large portico entrances and spacious first floor balconies.
Earls Court Square was something of an afterthought. Originally Kempsford Gardens was going to extend right to the Earls Court Road. This was the basis on which Edward Francis built the houses nearest to Earls Court Road which were Nos. 3-11 (odd) on the north side and Nos. 2-10 (even) on the south side in 1873-4. In 1874 it was decided to build a square, instead of another north/south road from Old Brompton Road. In 1875 Francis continued his houses along the north side. Work on the east side of the square began in 1875 and on the west side in 1876. By 1879 Francis had run out of funding and had to apply for bankruptcy. The market for such large houses had collapsed in the late 1870s and it was not until the 1890s that the houses Francis had been building were finally fully occupied.
Most of the houses Francis built in the square have stock brick façades with stucco dressings. On the west side and for some of the north houses the façades are fully stuccoed. First floor windows are often supported by composite engaged columns, similar to those supporting the portico for the entrance. There are canted bays at basement and ground level supporting an ironwork balcony. Second floor windows often have a smaller balcony.
No work started on the south side of the square for many years. Nos. 30-52 (even) Earls Court Square were finally constructed in 1888-90 by John Douglas, son of the South Kensington builder William Douglas, who had built extensively in the Kensington area before going bankrupt the previous year. Nos. 30-38 have two main storeys above a basement, with an additional storey in the mansard roof. Nos. 40-52 are similar but with an attic storey in a gable roof. They were much smaller than Francis’s houses and sold more successfully. They are all red brick. Some have square bay windows at ground floor level only, and others have canted bays up to the first floor.
In 1891-2 Douglas built Herbert Court Mansions, a block of flats, on the south east corner of the square just below Farnell Mews. This is a five storey block, with a basement below, in red brick with cement dressings. The entrance has an ornate segmental pediment and there is a similar pediment at roof level. Douglas followed this in 1894-6 with a seven storey block of flats near the Warwick Road end of the south side, which was called Langham Mansions. This was built in red brick, with terracotta decoration and an iron crested pavilion roof. More blocks followed in the area between Earls Court Square and Old Brompton Road. Sage and Company, a Hammersmith firm of builders run by Edgar Sage built a six storey block of flats called The Mansions on Old Brompton Road frontage in 1891-2. A rather larger development in 1892-4 was the four blocks for Wetherby Mansions built by Sage & Company and Foley & Company on either side of the extension road from Earls Court Square to Earls Court Road. The Wetherby Mansions development was continued with another block in 1895-7, designed by Cubitt Nichols, Lord Kensington’s surveyor, and built by H & A Harris of Brompton Road.
The square suffered some war damage and in 1974 some of the houses on the north side of the square were demolished but speedy local action lead to the houses being reinstated.
