One estate covering 87 acres in Kensington was the Harrington-Villars estate. In the 17th century, there was a large country house called Hale House, which once stood where Queen's Gate crosses the Cromwell Road. In 1606 Sir William Blake, who had a wine business in the City, bought the house and the surrounding land as his country residence. In 1645, when Blake and then his widow had died, William Methwold, a director of the East India Company, bought the house and land. Methwold was still ‘family’ because he had married Sir William Blake's sister. He also added to the estate by buying some additional land from the Blake family.
The estate stayed in the Methwold family till 1754 when his great grandson, Thomas Methwold, sold the estate to Sir John Fleming, a captain in the army. The Hale House land comprised only the southern part of the modern Queen’s Gate area. In 1763 Fleming bought an additional 28 acres on which the northern part of Queen's Gate, Queen's Gate Terrace and Elvaston Place were later built.
Fleming had two daughters, so when he died in 1763 they each acquired a share in
his estate. The eldest daughter, Seymour Dorothy Fleming, married Sir Richard
Worsley, who was not only a Member of Parliament in England but also a Minister
to the Republic of Venice. When he died in 1805 - presumably tired out by the
commuting - Seymour Dorothy married a Swiss named Jean Louis Cuchet. He sounds
like a bit of a social climber and adventurer. They both changed their names to
Fleming and he became ‘John Lewis Fleming’. They moved to Paris where Seymour
Dorothy died in 1818, and he inherited her half share in her father’s estate.
Cuchet then married the daughter of a French count and very successfully began
climbing another social tree – he was made a Baron by Louis XVIII in 1821. The
baron had a daughter, Cesarine, by his French wife and he left the share in the
Kensington estate to her. So quite quickly one half of Sir John Fleming’s estate
was owned by people not related to him in any way. In 1841, Cesarine married
Denis Bernard Frederic Baron de Graffenried Villars of Switzerland (the
‘Villars’ of the ‘Harrington-Villars’ estate).
Inheritance of the other half of the estate proceeded in a more conventional manner. In 1779 Sir John Fleming's second daughter, Jane, married Charles Stanhope, the 3rd Earl of Harrington. Her share in the estate was inherited by their son the 4th Earl of Harrington, and then by his brother, Leicester Fitzgerald Charles Stanhope, the 5th Earl.
In 1846 the two beneficiaries decided to finally settle the estate, which had never been divided up. Until then the land had been let to market gardeners and the proceeds divided. In 1850 the Court of Chancery formally approved a division of the land. They drew lots from a hat to decide who got which bits of the estate.
One of the pieces which was allocated to the Baron and Baroness de was nearly four acres of land to the west of Onslow Square, which effectively separated the Smith's Charity's main holding from land called Brompton Heath (roughly the site of present day Cranley Gardens and Evelyn Gardens) further west. So it was a strategic piece of land from the Smith’s Charity’s point of view. The Graffenried Villars sold this land to the Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851.
The Smith’s Charity, on the other hand, owned a piece of land in St. Margaret’s parish, Westminster, called 'The Carpet Ground', which the 1851 Commissioners needed in order to build their museums between Queen’s Gate, Kensington Road, Exhibition Road and Cromwell Road. Although the Carpet Ground was an acre smaller, the Smith’s Charity trustees were able to do a straight exchange in 1852. This allowed them to join up the two parts of their estate. The terms were agreed in December 1852 and confirmed by the Inclosure Commissioners (whose permission was required) in 1856.
At the time Charles Freake was developing the Sydney Place and Onslow Square area for the trustees. So the acquisition of this land allowed the trustees to extend the development westwards. Freake later claimed to have brokered the deal. In fact that may be true - he had a very good reason for wanting the deal to go ahead. He entered into a building agreement with the Smith’s Charity trustees to develop the land in August 1861. Since he was nearing completion of the housing in Onslow Square on Smith’s Charity's adjoining land , he was able to move his work force almost immediately into the new area.