South Kensington
Early history of Smith's charity's estate
In his will Henry Smith instructed his trustees to buy land to provide incomes of £60 a year for the two charities he had set up. He didn’t say where the land should be, and the trustees didn’t look very far. They simply bought land from individual trustees. The Charity’s property was not all in London. The trustees bought land in Leicestershire and Hampshire from William Rolfe, and land in Essex from Sir Christopher Neville, both trustees.
Rolfe’s brother-in-law (and another trustee) was Sir William Blake, an old friend of Henry Smith’s. He owned eighty five and a half acres of land in the parishes of Kensington, Chelsea and St. Margaret’s, Westminster. Either he sold it to the Charity, or his beneficiaries did after his death, but the result was that in 1630 Henry Smith’s Charity became the owner of the London estate. It was essentially open farm land and it would be 150 years before anyone thought of building houses on it.
No steps were taken to find tenants for the land during the Civil War and Commonwealth period. But business life returned to normal after the Restoration. The trustees continued to keep things in the family and in 1664 they granted a lease of the whole London estate to Christopher Blake, Sir William Blake’s grandson. He agreed to pay a rent of £130 a year and to spend £500 on new buildings and improvements in return for a seventy year lease. There was one large house which a former tenant, Robert Sewell, had built and there were a number of cottages. Christopher Blake died in about 1672 and his sister, Maria Dorney, inherited the lease. She left it to her son by her first marriage, John Harris. John Harris sold the lease to Richard Galloway, who was a Knightsbridge innkeeper. Francis Galloway (presumably his son) was the owner of the lease when it finally expired in 1734.
Galloway was allowed to stay on although no new lease was signed. In 1749 he sold his interest to a Doctor William Bucknall. Dr Bucknall had recently bought Brompton Hall, a mansion on the other side of Old Brompton Road, opposite the Smith’s Charity estate. The trustees promptly granted a new twenty one year lease to Dr Bucknall so it seems likely that Galloway’s sale to Bucknall had been done under an arrangement with the trustees, to clear Galloway arrears of rent. But if the trustees hoped Bucknall would be an improvement, they were to be disappointed. He also fell behind with his rent and by 1759 he owed the trustees £800. The trustees were forced to do another deal to recover their arrears. In return for rent being paid up to date, the trustees agreed to cancel Bucknall’s lease and to grant his son, Samuel Bucknall, a new seventy year term at the same £151 a year rent.
William Bucknall died in 1763 and his son, Samuel, died in 1770, and Samuel’s two sisters inherited the lease. When they too died, their husbands, the Reverend Joseph Griffith and Morgan Rice, inherited it and Joseph Griffith moved into Brompton Hall.
