#22: THE SWEENEY... THE SWEENEY... THE SWEENEY...
Ed Jefferson is attempting to visit every Mews in Greater London. This week: tennis racket guts, Ian Nairn selfies and Dwarf News.
This is The Sweeney special for people who love the old TV show The Sweeney with young Inspector Morse and his friend punching all the crimes (?). I don’t know anything about it because I’ve never seen it but there you go. Why this is The Sweeney special may or may not become apparent. The Sweeney!
#211 Boyne Terrace Mews, Kensington and Chelsea, W11
Confusingly, there is no Boyne Terrace for this to be the Mews of - it is was what the group of houses to the south were addressed as before at the end of the 19th century someone realised that changing the street name every hundred yards was a bit stupid and combined all the various Terraces into Holland Park Road. The residents of Boyne Terrace could also breathe a sigh of relief that no-one could mistakenly think they might be running a brothel, because in 1967 there was a bit of a stir in the Mews when a Mrs Dorothy Waters was charged with doing exactly that. More like Boink Terrace Mews.
Her story was that she was an innocent grandmother who just did the cleaning and would answer the door to let men in sometimes, and that what the men might happen to get up to afterwards with Sally, the lady who lived upstairs, was none of her business. This was not that convincing, not least because Mrs Waters already had a conviction for assisting in the management of a brothel.
The magistrate who found her guilty had some ‘interesting’ and definitely not self-incriminating things to say, e.g. “when I was in the army I used to regard a brothel as a place where you could walk in and see lots of women, but now it seems a brothel only has to consist of two women”. What do you regard a brothel as, readers?
#212 Lansdowne Mews, Kensington and Chelsea, W11
An 1851 map shows this as Grove Terrace Mews, serving the terrace next to Boyne Terrace, though confusingly a later map shows both it and Boyne Terrace Mews as being a single road called Lansdowne Mews. Perhaps it just didn’t matter that much as until the 20th century they were both mostly inhabited by horses and horses can’t read maps.
#213 Ladbroke Mews, Kensington and Chelsea, W11
Called Alfred Mews until the 1930s, and not to be confused with Ladbroke Walk to the west, which was originally called Ladbroke Mews or Ladbroke Terrace Mews and was renamed around the same time for some kind of reason I expect.
In the late 1970s, played a very minor part in one of the biggest fraud cases in banking history, in that it was the home of Emile Fleischmann, one of only two Hungarian men in the somewhat erroneously named Hungarian Circle, who spent the best part of 20 years getting away with hundreds of millions of pounds worth of financial forgery despite being quite crap at forging documents - their main forger, Francisco Fiocca, literally forgot to cross the t’s in some instances.
The somewhat motley crew also included a former all England squash player, a former Nazi tank commander, and Billy Ambrose, a businessman who some suspect of having had some involvement in the Great Train Robbery (either way this time he once again avoided prosecution). Leader Henry Oberlander maintained that the dozens of dodgy passports he was caught with were necessary for his important work hunting escaped Nazis (he claimed to have helped catch Jospeh Mengele), though this was most likely, as with everything else he ever said, a total lie. Rubbish British caper movie when?
#214 Hippodrome Mews, Kensington and Chelsea, W11
The name of this Mews alludes not to the London Hippodrome, the former West End theatre that’s now a casino and home to Magic Mike Live, but to the Kensington Hippodrome, a long deceased, and rather short lived, racecourse.
In the early decades of the 19th century it became apparent that the large tract of land in this area owned by the Ladbroke family was at some point going be very valuable as London spilled west and the demand for property increased, but by 1836 most of these plans had stalled for various reasons. So the Ladbrokes instead leased the land to John Whyte, who had a brilliant plan - if Londoners didn’t want to live here yet, maybe they would at least want to visit a racecourse here rather than trekking all the way down to bloody Epsom.
A brilliant plan, with only 2 minor issues: for a start, building the course involved fencing off a very well-used public footpath, which resulted in a lot of protest and a successful legal proceeding to remove the fence. On opening day large numbers of people then used the footpath to access the Hippodrome free of charge, and they were not exactly the clientele Whyte might have wanted, having piled in from the “Potteries and Piggeries”, the very poor district to the west - The Sunday Times accused the intruders of “defiling the atmosphere” and “carrying into the neighbourhood […] a coarseness and obscenity of language as repulsive to every feeling of manhood as to every sense of common decency”. Goals. Attempts to have the footpath rerouted failed, and eventually Whyte instead altered the layout of the course.
A perhaps bigger issue was that the horse racing itself was crap - one reviewer described the horses as “animated dog’s meat” and the course was built on clay soil, which has poor drainage and was eventually judged by most jockeys as too dangerous to bother with, so it was a struggle put any races on at all, and within 5 years the Hippodrome closed, and housebuilding resumed.
Ironically Hippodrome Mews (once Montpelier Mews, possibly renamed to avoid confusion with a road in Knightsbridge), named for a racecourse done for by clay, still has a large 19th century kiln standing in one corner - the accursed clay had made the area ideal for brickfields and potteries.
The Mews was redeveloped as a housing estate in the late 1970s and the kiln was incorporated into one of the homes as a dining room and wine cellar. This probably puts it at the high end of a row of houses that are, kiln aside, externally unremarkable, but won’t leave you much change from £2 million quid: quite a turn around for what was in the days of the actual Hippodrome one of the worst slums in London (“a plague spot scarcely equalled for its insalubrity” - C Dickens).
#215 Christophers Mews, Kensington and Chelsea, W11
A 1980s housing development built on the site of building that had been used as a primary school and then as Holland Park Mission, a Christian institution offering various services to the local community. It was run by the West London Christian Fellowship, an evangelical church that on occasion made claims to have basements full of the discarded crutches and wheelchairs of those healed by prayer. Hrm. Still, they were popular - in the 1990s the church was hosting ‘Revival Healing Services' at the Royal Albert Hall! My people call that the Doctor Who Prom.
#216 Royal Crescent Mews, Kensington and Chelsea, W11
When it was slightly less salubrious than it is now, appeared in two episode of The Sweeney, presumably as the location for some bad crimes.
A notable actual crime in 1985 saw many of the garages on the Mews demolished by a property developer who had been conned into thinking he’d bought them off two men who did not, in fact own them. I’m not a lawyer but just in my opinion it is probably best to doublecheck that kind of stuff before you hire a bulldozer.
Less criminally, until his death in 1976, the Mews was home to the workshop of Remy Menon, reputedly the greatest tennis racket stringer in the world, who provided services to the likes of Arthur Ashe and Billy Jean King. Upon his death his widow Pat took over - she was apparently not initially confident enough to quit her job at the gas board, but her work was highly regarded in its own right and she was apparently in great demand every time Wimbledon came around. Fun fact (except if you’re a sheep or a cow): it takes 36 foot of sheep or cow guts to string a racket - though these days polyester is more common, because of woke I expect.
#217 Hansard Mews, Kensington and Chelsea, W14
Disappointingly has no apparent connection to Hansard, the official record of parliament. In the 1970s, one of the houses was the HQ of a different publication: Dwarf News. This was not about Warhammer, but was instead the journal of The Dwarfs, a group that had also been known as the Aquarian Liberation Front, whose stated aim was to create a new society freed from capitalist doctrine. They wanted to create a self-governed society based entirely on farming communes and renewable energy, but in practical terms don’t appear to have achieved much beyond failing to win seats on the local council, giving each other pretend ministerial titles and putting on a free Hawkwind gig.
#218 Russell Gardens Mews, Kensington and Chelsea, W14
The Sweeney fans: this was also the location of some kind of bad crime in The Sweeney! Make a note in your big The Sweeney notebook!
According to his autobiography, Parcel Arrived Safely: Tied With String, actor Michael Crawford was living here in “a little council flat” at the time that he was cast in “Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em”, following his divorce. He didn’t have any furniture, and does not record whether or not a cat done a whoopsie in his beret.
#219 Holland Park Mews, Kensington and Chelsea, W11
Also appeared an episode of The Sweeney!
Nairn’s London, the most famous tome of architectural critic Ian Nairn, doesn’t feature many Mewses, but this is a notable exception - he calls it “a cathedral among mewses” whose entrance “must see every variety of human and automotive temperament in the course of a year”. What would he have made of the group of people using it a background for Instagram selfies?
To be honest, I felt vaguely nauseous seeing people coming and going from their extremely nice, and extremely expensive homes. When will I be able to live here? It is against my human rights that I am not allowed to. Ian Holm got to live here, the hobbit/borrower actor twat. You can make me all small using the computer or whatever if you like, just give me one of these to live in.
#220 Drayson Mews, Kensington and Chelsea, W8
Closely follows the path of the Circle Line of the London Underground - the Mews was constructed on the land left behind after the Metropolitan Railway cut and covered its way through this part of Kensington. Various units still operate as businesses/light industry - until around 2016 it was home to Queen Elizabeth II’s Jaguar dealer of choice, RA Creamer & Son, until Jaguar decided that the operation wasn’t shiny and 21st century enough for their brand and they were forced to close, Royal warrant be damned.
The Mews briefly appears in Mad Old Men, a self-published novel about some old advertising men starting an advertising agency to teach the young advertising men how it’s really done, that one can only assume was written by an old advertising man who want to teach the young advertising men how it’s really done but can’t be bothered. Maybe one day I’ll write a novel about an old man who decides to try and visit all the Mewses in Greater London to teach the young men who are trying to visit all the Mewses in Greater London how it’s really done.
(Don’t think this was in The Sweeney.)
Mewses Visited So Far: 220/2380
