Tag: Kensington
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London’s Cosmic House
London’s Cosmic House is one of the strangest, cleverest private houses in the city: a Holland Park villa turned postmodern manifesto, cosmic joke, architectural puzzle box and museum.
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The London Tree Slowly Eating a Postbox
London does eccentricity well, but sometimes the city doesn’t even need to try. In Chelsea, on the corner of Drayton Gardens and Priory Walk, a London plane tree is gradually swallowing an Edwardian postbox. Not metaphorically. Properly, visibly, bark-over-metal, as if the tree got bored of pigeons and moved on to infrastructure. The tree is…
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The Thin House of Thurloe Square
Stand at the wrong angle on Thurloe Square and you’ll miss it entirely. Blink and it disappears, slipping into the visual static of South Kensington’s immaculate terraces. But shift a few steps, tilt your head, and there it is: the Thin House, a red-brick optical joke wedged into one of London’s most self-possessed garden squares.…
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The Spanish Community of London
In London a city of haste and hard edges, one might not immediately think of flamenco guitars, seaside siestas or midday “café con leche”. And yet: the Spanish community—those with roots in Spain, those from Spanish-speaking lands more broadly, and those drawn to the language and culture like a moth to a garlicky pan—has carved…
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Hans Town: London’s Elegant Ghost Town That Isn’t a Town
If you stroll out of Sloane Square, past the neat garden squares and the Georgian terraces that never seem to gather dust, you are entering Hans Town — a name that sounds like Monopoly kitsch but actually hides one of London’s strangest civic ghosts. It isn’t a town. It never really was. What we call…