Before the Georgian period London really covered only the City and Westminster. Just about everything we now regard as central or prime residential London – Kensington, Earls Court, Fulham, Regents Park - was constructed by the Georgians and Victorians.  For most of the 19th Century when this construction was taking place, the well-to-do relied entirely on horses and carriages to get about.  So the speculators and developers who built the great squares and new streets of London had to include accommodation for horses, carriages and grooms.  These were provided in narrow streets hidden away behind the main terraces, often with grand arches to conceal the menial area beyond. They were generally named mews. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the meaning of mews as ‘a set of stabling grouped around an open space, yard or alley and serving for the accommodation of carriage horses and carriages’. (It was not only the residents who required stabling. The police needed stabling as well.  Part of Adam and Eve Mews was so used in the 1880s.)

The heyday – no pun intended - of the mews very quickly came and went.  In the 1890s, the fashion for large houses for large families and even larger numbers of servants was waning.  From then on, new developments concentrated on flats or smaller houses.  Households no longer had horses and carriages.  Fewer mews were built.  Those that remained gradually became converted to commercial use or were used as housing for the lower classes, as the wealthier classes took advantage of cars and trains to live even further out of London in suburbia.

The introduction of the horse-drawn omnibus which provided a 'bus' service along major roads did not particularly reduce demand for mews. But the effect of railways was very great.  The introduction of train lines and the underground meant that people were no longer so reliant on horse-drawn traffic.  Most of the main train and underground lines were built by 1870.  From 1870 the proportion of stables to houses shrunk.  That year, Charles Freake the main Kensington developer converted Sydney Mews into a block of studios.  This was increasingly done with leftover land in Kensington for the rest of the century.  Stabling built after 1880, like Adam and Eve Mews, was generally intended for industrial or commercial use, rather than for use by householders nearby.  From then on, most people travelled into London by train.

The first wave of enthusiasm for mews houses as residences came in the First World War era when many mews were turned into cottages, often with a mock Tudor or Arts-and-Crafts style. The change from horses to cars gave mews properties an additional attraction. In 1913 stables in Astwood Mews were converted  by Aldin Brothers into private residences with “motor houses”. Interest waned after the Second World War. It was in the swinging 60s that people really began again to see the attraction of small mews houses. There has been no let-up yet!