The morning of this walk began misty, but by the time I met the group I was walking with (our leader a Blue Badge Guide), the sun was out and blue sky was all around us.
Pimlico is close to Westminster, up (or is it down) river. It started out as marsh land. Hardly anyone lived there. The Manor of Ebury (or The Five Fields) is a triangular piece of land which eventually passed into the hands of Mary Davies, who as the age of twelve married (yes, really) Sir Thomas Grosvenor in 1666. By the time of the nineteenth century there was a demand for houses and so Pimlico, not as popular as its neighbours of Belgravia and Mayfair, began a building campaign. The man to do it was Thomas Cubitt and he used reclaimed soil from St Katherine’s Dock (close to the Tower of London) to help with construction and built a grid of handsome white stucco buildings.
Cubitt preferred to be known as a builder rather than an architect. He was also consulted by Prince Albert to help redesign Osborne House. There is a statue of Thomas Cubitt in Denbigh Street.
Pimlico has three squares, all of which have their own gardens. Only one of these, St George’s, is open to the public. The other two you need keys for (the residents of the houses on those squares hold keys as it’s part of their shared gardens), and very beautiful those gardens look, too.
We walked through St George’s garden to the right, through the trees, is St Saviour’s Church built by Thomas Cundy (Junior). This church’s claim to fame is their kindergarten in which Diana, Prince of Wales, worked before she married Prince Charles. Apparently, there is a bench in the gardens dedicated to her and the work she did there.
Over the road from St George’s Gardens is the River Thames. From here you can see the many tall buildings of Vauxhall, including the 8th tallest in England. Unfortunately, in 2015 a helicopter clipped to top of this in fog one morning killing several people. At one time there was a landing stage, or pier, leading from the Thames to St George’s Square, very nice for the residents! Today there is Pimlico Gardens with a statue of William Huskisson, a politician who unfortunately became the first person to be killed in a train accident, that train being Stephenson’s Rocket.
There is a great mix of housing in Pimlico, the beautiful buildings of Cubitt, new (1960’s) award winning estates near St James the Less Church, and the Churchill Gardens estate which boasts Grade I Listed status. There is even a line of Grade I Listed telephone boxes. One estate, the Dolphin, has its own shops and a swimming pool. Being close to Westminster it was popular with MP’s, but also housed a spy, Oswald Mosley and Diana Mitford.
Nearby in Eccleston Square, is where Winston Churchill himself lived and where his first two children were born. Next door is the Labour Party’s former Headquarters from where they ran their 1926 General Strike Campaign.
There are other famous people who once lived from Pimlico, including the man who invented Lawn Tennis (Major Walter Wingfield), Laura Ashley, Michael Costa (conductor of music) and Aubrey Beardsley (artist).
Finally, we ended our walk at St James the Less, a very unusual church. Very dark inside but the detail is amazing – the ironwork, bricks (same brick as the estate it adjoins) and it has the lovely artwork by George Frederic Watts, a Victorian artist of the aesthetic movement. Originally a painting, the paint began to come apart, so the work was made into a mosaic. Being a fan of the aesthetic movement, I was delighted to come across this.
This was the end of the walk and back at Pimlico tube station we said our goodbyes and went our separate ways. Pimlico may be small but it is more interesting than I ever knew.
My London+ 