Lost streets, Meek Street and the Proud City

World's End 1894-6

The World's End has lost many street names over time. From east to west these include Ann's Place off Milman's Street (once Milman's Row), Gilray (previously Strewan) Square and Lacland Terrace, all buried beneath the council's Cremorne Estate, completed in 1956, the latter two being commemorated in the blocks Gilray House and Lacland House. Riley Street, which used to run from the embankment in a straight line up to the King's Road and coming out opposite Limerston Street, has survived, albeit bent around Apollo House and the gardens and playground in front of Riley House and truncated so as to end at Ann Lane. Jackson's Buildings and Foundry Place, two cul-de-sacs running north off World's End Passage, had already been swept away by the Chelsea Housing Improvement Society Limited's slum clearance of 1929-31, which erected Follett, Albert Gray, Macnamara and Walter Houses.

Further streets were sacrificed to the World's End Estate, completed in 1977; Luna Street, Seaton Street and Dartrey Road disappeared, along with Raasey, Bifron and Vicat Streets. Rather like Riley Street mentioned above, Blantyre Street remains as a stump.

Of the criss-cross of streets south-west of Cremorne Road, between the King's Road and Lots Road, only one has gone, victim not to any housing scheme, but bombed out of existence during the Second World War, as the Germans sought to hit Lots Road Power Station. Meek Street ran from Lots Road across Tetcott, Upcerne and Uverdale Roads as far as Tadema Road. It still exists according to Google Maps (according to Google Maps the whole of Chelsea is called Kensington), but in effect what remains of it is now considered to be an extension of Uverdale Road, as the street sign says. The rest of Meek Street now lies beneath Westfield Park, laid out over the bomb site.

Below is a photograph of the junction of Meek Street and Upcerne Road taken in 1944 after the bombing.

Walter E. Spradbery, who produced 62 successful posters for the London Underground between 1912 and 1944, clearly based one of his posters on the photograph above. In 1944 he produced a series of six posters under the title The Proud City, depicting iconic London buildings which had survived the Blitz in the midst of devastation all around. Lots Road Power Station (Chelsea Power House in the poster) was honoured along with the Tower of London, the Temple Church and Library, St Thomas's Hospital and the Houses of Parliament, the Church of St Clement Danes and St Paul's Cathedral. Each image is accompanied by a poetic quotation. One time West Chelsea resident James McNeill Whistler provides that for the Power Station:

"... the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens ..."

At the end of the war a number of prefabs, still standing in the late sixties when my dad took me round to gape at them, were erected on the bomb site. Ex-Chelsea star (though apparently a boyhood Fulham fan) Alan Hudson is known to have been brought up in one of these. A glimpse of them can be had on the left-hand side of this still from the 1952 film I Believe in You, which shows Cecil Parker walking down Upcerne in the direction of the Power Station. Most of the site is now covered by Westfield Park.