History of the Gunter Estate
Robert Gunter II and James Gunter II
Old Brompton Road divides the Gunter Estate into north and south portions. The north portion runs from Old Brompton Road up to Cromwell Road and from the Earls Court Road in the east to just short of Gloucester Road in the west. The south portion runs from Old Brompton Road down to Fulham Road in the south and from Brompton Cemetery in the east to The Boltons in the west.
In the 18th century this was all mainly farmland, with just a few houses strung along the Earls Court Road. Much of the land was used for nurseries, particularly for propagating roses. There was also a substantial gravel pit in Goodwin’s Field (now Coleherne Court and Harcourt Terrace).
The northern portion was known just by field names. Most of the later estate was built on Great Court Field. The present site of Wetherby Gardens was Little Court Field. The field on the corner of Old Brompton Road and Earl’s Court Road was locally known as Home Field (now Bolton and Bramham Gardens). Above that, was Four Acre Court Field (now the site of Hesper Mews). Then there were 7½ acres of land on which Bina and Gledhow Gardens came to be built which had no name at all.
For most of the 17th century the Arnold family owned and farmed all the land north of Old Brompton Road. In 1656 the estate passed by marriage to the Greene family who owned a brewery in Westminster. The land stayed in the Greene family for most of the 18th century. In 1793 they sold most of it to a local surgeon, John Hunter. (However, they kept the land nearest Old Brompton Road). After only a few months, John Hunter died.
It would be a mistake to imagine that all London estates were, like the Grosvenor or the Cadogan, the creation of wealthy nobles. James Gunter, the founder of the Gunter property empire, ran a cake shop in Berkeley Square. Nor did he have in mind the creation of a hugely valuable residential area. Earls Court was just farmland in the 18th century. James Gunter bought land piecemeal so he could run a market gardening business – something akin to today’s garden centres.
James Gunter’s first involvement in the area was to take a sub-lease of part of Home Field and Great Court Field from a local farmer in 1797. In 1799 he bought the freehold from John Hunter’s executors. In 1799 James Gunter he bought Earls Court Lodge (near the present Barkston Gardens) which was to be the Gunters’ family home for the next 60 years. This was one of the few substantial houses in the area. (The aristocratic neighbours at nearby Earls Court House, who weren’t keen on having a cake shop owner next door, called it “Currant-Jelly Hall”).
In 1805 the first property developer appeared on the scene. Thomas Smith, a Chelsea builder, bought several parcels of land in Great Court Field and Home Field from the owners. But within months James Gunter had bought Smith’s land in Great Court Field and In 1807 he also bought his Home Field land. (Most of the rest of the Gunter’s north estate - Little Court Field and the 7 ½ unnamed acres west of it – which had been retained by the Greene family was acquired by James Gunter II in 1857.)
James Gunter’s first venture into the southern area was also a purchase from Thomas Smith. In 1805 he bought some land where Coleherne Road and Redcliffe Square now stand. Two years later he added a much bigger plot where The Boltons were later built. To connect these two plots, Gunter needed to buy the land in between – the Goodwin’s Field gravel pit and the site of Coleherne Court. But he was beaten to it. The owner, William Bolton, (also called William Bolton Poynton) sold the land to Philip Gilbert, a goldsmith, in 1808. The Gunters were not able to buy it until the 1860s. However, Gunter continued his piecemeal acquisition of land along the Old Brompton Road. In 1801 he bought the land where Redcliffe Square now stands. In 1811 he bought the land where the Boltons were later built. In 1812 he connected his “Boltons” holding to Fulham Road by buying the land round the present Gilston Road.
James Gunter carried out a small amount of house building at the western edge of his estate. Between 1808 and 1810 he built some villas in the corner of Earls Court Road and Old Brompton Road and also south of Old Brompton Road to the west of Coleherne House. These were all later demolished for more intensive house building under his grandchildren. James Gunter died in 1819.
Robert Gunter inherited his father’s estate, but not outright. James Gunter’s will stated that Robert should only have a life interest in the estate and that when he died it should go to Robert’s first-born son. Not only was this inconvenient to Robert but it was a bit of a leap in the dark for his father, because Robert had no son in James’s lifetime. However, Robert later had two sons: Robert Gunter II, born in 1831, and James Gunter II, born in 1833.
In 1829 Robert Gunter I purchased Earls Court House, another grand house near his own home in Earls Court Lodge. In 1832 it was let to Mary Bradbury as a private lunatic asylum for ladies. In the 1840s it had about thirty inmates. It was kept going as an asylum until 1878, and was finally pulled down for the building of Barkston Gardens in 1886.
Robert Gunter made one significant addition to the family holdings. In 1836 he bought the Cathcart Road area, a large block of land below the present Tregunter Road. He indulged in some property building, mainly in the estate south of Old Brompton Road. But his main preoccupation was in running an innovative market garden business in his estate north of Old Brompton Road.
Shortly before his death in 1852, Robert Gunter I did initiate a more ambitious development in The Boltons area. He may have taken this new direction under the influence of the younger George Godwin, who Robert appointed as one of his executors, and who had already acted as architect on the development of Robert Gunter’s holdings in Sydney Street. The outline scheme for The Boltons was settled by 1849. Work began in 1850 and many of the houses were completed before Robert Gunter’s death in October 1852.
The practice Robert Gunter employed (presumably on Godwin’s advice) was to grant leases to the builders (or their nominees) of 81 years from 1850, at a ground rent which commenced immediately. (In other parts of London, builders were often only charged a peppercorn rent for the first few years, to allow them to build and let the houses before having to pay a full ground rent.) His sons continued this lease pattern, but from the 1860s began to grant 99 year leases, some of which did not finally expire until 1984.
Robert Gunter II and James Gunter II
When Robert Gunter I died, the estate created by his father passed by his father's will in its entirety to Robert Gunter II, who was then 21. James Gunter’s will could have caused a great deal of jealousy between his grandchildren. In an attempt to redress the balance, Robert Gunter I left the land he had personally bought near Tregunter Road to his other son, James, who was 19. But clearly the brothers were not going to let money come between them. Both joined the Dragoon Guards and fought together in the Crimean War from 1854 to 1856. And they apparently re-apportioned the estate between them. The family’s solicitor, J L Tomlin, was involved in a series of deeds and transfers of land between the brothers.
As a London base, the brothers seem to have shared occupation of Earl’s Court Lodge. But they had no particular affection for the Kensington countryside. In 1857 Robert Gunter II moved to Wetherby Grange in Yorkshire to live. He was the Commander of the Yorkshire Regiment and became a Member of Parliament for Barkston Ash. He gave the streets on his Kensington estate good Yorkshire town names, like Knaresborough and Wetherby. He was created a baronet in 1901 and became Sir Robert Gunter. He died in 1905.
James stayed on in the army and became a Captain in the Dragoon Guards. He commanded the Royal Irish Dragoon Guards and was a Major General when he retired in 1887. In the 1880s, he lived at Boston Hall, Tadcaster in Yorkshire. He married in 1891 and died in 1908.
Growing roses probably did not appeal to career soldiers, and by the 1850s there was an increasing demand for housing in the Earls Court area. The younger Gunters continued to buy land. James Gunter II bought Little Court Field in 1857. Initially they probably had little interest in development. The land behind Earls Court Lodge, for instance, was let as a cricket ground for many years. But the increasing value of building land and the developments going on all around the estate must have made it increasingly the only business-like way of capitalising on their estate.
Although the Gunters had separate (albeit adjoining) land, they both employed the same surveyors, George and Henry Godwin, to supervise the plans. The individual builders would have had to produce plans by their own architects, but conform to general specifications set down by the Godwins. Most of the houses were terraced. Before the 1880s each house had the front door entrance hall on the same side, but after 1880 mirrored pairs of houses with grouped front doors were favoured. The building of mews behind houses was also a feature.
The Gunters used various builders. The leading builder in the north part of the estate was John Spicer until his death in 1883. The main force behind development in the south part of the estate was the partnership of William Corbett and Alexander McClymont. From 1864 to 1878, they constructed what they called the Redcliffe Estate, which ran the length of Redcliffe Gardens from Redcliffe Square in the north to Redcliffe Place in the south. This development not only covered land owned by the Gunter brothers but also the estate to the south owned by the Pettiward family. However it seems that George and Henry Godwin, the Gunter’s surveyors, were responsible for the plans of all the houses on the Redcliffe Estate.
The development could not start until the Gunters had managed to buy the land between Redcliffe Square and The Boltons which James Gunter I had missed out on back in 1808. This land contained Coleherne House and Hereford House (the site of the old gravel pit of Goodwin’s Field). In 1864 James Gunter II bought nearly all this land from the widow of Reverend Edward Gilbert, the last owner. There was just one small piece which divided Seymour Walk and Redcliffe Road from The Boltons, and which had been sold off to a solicitor earlier in 1864. The freehold, in this case, ended up in the hands of Corbett and McClymont themselves.
Redcliffe Road to the west was never owned by the Gunters, although it is part of the overall housing development. It was owned by the Batchellor family of Gloucestershire. Much of Hollywood Road was owned by the Gilbert family. The large area bounded by Fulham Road and Brompton Cemetery below Redcliffe Street has remained in the hands of the Pettiward family. It all now looks much like the Gunter Estate because the owners cooperated in the overall development which was all carried out by Corbett and McClymont.
In 1864 the builders started in Hollywood Road, and moved steadily building west and north-west. They had to take that route, because as of yet, the land on which Redcliffe Street and Westgate Terrace were to be built were still in other hands. This piece of land stood between the Gunters’ land fronting Old Brompton Road and the Pettiward Estate fronting Fulham Road, both on the Brompton Cemetery side. Robert Gunter II bought it in 1866. That was the last of the Gunters’ major freehold purchases.
Corbett and McClymont built more houses in South Kensington in the 1870s than any other builders. But they went bankrupt in 1878 owing £1.25 million. It seems they had over-extended themselves and been caught with too many empty houses which were not selling because of a depression in the house market. In any event, they were trying to sell slightly out-of-date large houses in Redcliffe Square, whereas the style had moved on to smaller red brick houses.
In 1867, on the other side of the estate, Creswell Gardens and Creswell Place were laid out on land which Robert Gunter bought from the Atwood family of market gardeners. Gunter entered into an agreement with John Spicer to redevelop the site. Spicer died in 1883 before it could be completed, and it would seem that his son, G J Spicer, a solicitor, was involved in the subsequent development. Various builders were employed, who used their own architects to design houses.
Robert Gunter II's part of the estate was inherited by his son, Sir R B Nevill Gunter. In 1917 he put his estate up for auction, but it failed to reach the reserve price. Sir Nevill died two months later and his son, Sir R V Gunter, inherited.
James Gunter II's part of the estate was inherited by Mr R G Gunter.
By the beginning of the 20th century, the demand for flats, rather than houses, had become quite apparent. So in 1901 to 1904 Coleherne House and Hereford House were demolished and replaced by three large blocks of flats called Coleherne Court. Between the World Wars, a small amount of building continued, particularly a hospital at the corner of Old Brompton Road and Finborough Road. After the Second World War, bomb damage led to some rebuilding, and some council blocks were built. But largely the estate remains as built under the ownership of the two Gunter brothers.
However, the Gunter family's remaining links with the estate were severed in 2002 when the estate was sold to an investment group.