South Kensington
Neville Street
Neville Street runs north from Fulham Road into Onslow Gardens.
It consists mainly of three and four-storey houses with stucco up to first floor level.
There are attractive first floor wrought-iron balconies.
The houses in Neville Street have three storeys above basements. There are 13 houses on each side of the street. The central and end houses stand slightly forward. Attic storeys were added to many houses in later periods.
Brompton Hospital was built in the 1840s. The hospital trustees bought most of the land from the Smiths Charity Estate on the north side of Fulham Road. In 1852 the land immediately to the west came up for sale, when the Harrington-Villars Estate, of which it formed part, was partitioned. The hospital ultimately bought this additional land. Part of it was applied to extending the garden of the hospital but the rest was set aside to be used for speculative building.
In 1853 the hospital’s surveyor, George Pownall, entered into an agreement with Charles Delay, a builder from Buckingham Palace Road, to develop the site. Neville Street was one of the streets to be constructed.
Delay’s first step was to build ‘The Rose’ public house on the Fulham Road corner. He then moved in as landlord and thereafter combined building and running his pub. Although he began construction work, he went mad in 1856 and was put in a lunatic asylum in Bow, where he died a year later. His widow, Ellen Delay, carried on with the contract but in 1859 she surrendered the land which had not yet been built on.
The hospital entered into a new agreement with Thomas Stimpson, a carpenter from Brompton Road. He built 29 houses in Neville Street and Neville Terrace.
