The latest restoration of the church in 1910 owes its origin to the short but vigorous rule of Mr. Prideaux, who recognised the necessity and did not allow himself to be daunted by the immense difficulties of the work required. Some of our conservative Chelsea hearts dreaded it, as though the Huns and Vandals were at our church gates, but the sympathetic manner in which it was carried out reconciled even the most fearful to the unavoidable changes.
As we remember the Rev. R. H. Davies very gratefully for freeing the two chapels from the thrall of private ownership, so we thank the Rev. S. P. T. Prideaux for so bravely carrying through the immense work of the restoration and re-beautifying of 1910.
To his successor, the Rev. M. S. Farmer, we owe the completion of the organ and the careful and reverent re-arrangement of the surrounding church garden.
As we leave the church, Cheyne Walk stretches stately and placid to either side of us, and the river beyond, which used to lap the churchyard wall when Henry VIII. was rowed up in his royal barge to visit the beloved Chancellor (whose head he presently cut off), shows like silver between the bounds of its magnificent embankment; all this must have a chapter to itself, and as we are at Church Street corner, we will take the opportunity of turning due north and following it, the “Church Lane” of older days, to its end at Queen’s Elm.
Just above the church lies the Petyt House, erected in 1706 by William Petyt; it has been rebuilt, but its Queen Anne character has been kept. A grim-faced portrait of its founder hangs inside, and the house is still used for Sunday-school and parish purposes, “Church purposes” being strictly prescribed. It was originally the parish school, succeeding a parochial school built somewhere near the same site by Rector Ward, “Cofferer to Queen Elizabeth,” in 1595. “Cofferer” is a delightful title, and suggests comfortable resources in the background.
Church Street is now a squalid thoroughfare leading from Fulham and King’s Road straight to the Embankment by a short cut that is narrow, crowded, and always swarming with children. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was dignified and residential, and even now if you obliterate in your mind’s eye the ugly, cheap shop fronts you will find Queen Anne brickwork behind; generous windows, warmly tiled roofs, and panelled rooms within. Here in the good Queen’s days lived the élite of the literary world: Bishop Atterbury schemed for the Stuarts in a “house on the waterside,” probably opposite the church; Dean Swift had his lodging a little further up the lane, where he deplored “confounded coarse sheets and an awkward bed”; Addison came across the fields from Sandford Manor House to meet the wits at Don Saltero’s coffee-house; Dr. Arbuthnot and Sir John Shadwell, the Queen’s physicians, and many others, scientists and men of letters, lived in the Church Street houses which to-day are stables, laundries, offices, and small shops.
Trelawny, Bishop of Winchester, was a force in this coterie’s earlier days; later Dr. Johnson visited here. Possibly the existence of great houses and influential owners of property in and about our Village of Palaces brought the wits and writers to Chelsea: Shrewsbury House, Winchester House, Lindsey House, Essex House, and others were in the possession of noblemen who might happily count as patrons to launch a new book or a new enterprise if the authors knew how to play their cards well and politely.
A few hundred yards above the Petyt House the rectory wall begins, and one of the most delightful houses and gardens in London is seen behind it. An older rectory house existed on much the same site from the early sixteenth century, and the roll of Chelsea rectors being complete since 1289, it may well have been earlier still. But in 1694 we read that Rector John King found the rectory house so dilapidated that he removed to lodgings in Church Lane, and it was probably rebuilt shortly afterwards. Rector Blunt, and our present rector, Archdeacon Bevan, have done much to beautify and improve it, and though they have generously given part of its surrounding land for necessary parish purposes, the garden, with Queen Elizabeth’s mulberry-tree, still remains a joy and refreshment to many—an oasis of flowers, and trees, and lovely age-old turf in the midst of the busiest commercial quarter of the parish.
The General Omnibus Company has its office where once the stage coaches used to rumble in from the Great North Road; and the King’s House, an unrivalled cinematograph theatre, faces the corner where, tradition says, the stocks used to stand for the wholesome punishment of miscreants and disturbers of the peace. If only the cinema could reproduce some of the scenes which were enacted on this spot two hundred years ago, how interesting would be the revival, and how Suffragettes would tremble!
Upper Church Street, across the King’s Road, was till recently a pretty countrified street, irregularly set with charming houses small and big. Here lived Felix Moscheles, the painter, Mr. De Morgan, the novelist, Mr. Bernard Partridge, the Punch cartoonist, reflecting and adding to the effulgence of the Chelsea Arts Club. But the newly planned Avenue of the Vale, with its antennæ of new streets in every direction, has cost us Church Street as we have loved it since childhood; “c’est magnifique,” this new tasteful suburb of old Chelsea, but it is not the homely purlieu that we, and Dean Swift, used to know.