FOR heaven’s sake, my dear,’ a wellwisher advises Lady Alexandrina de Courcy, in Trollope’s The Small House at Allington, when she is considering the properties that her future husband is prepared to offer her, ‘don’t let him take you anywhere beyond Eccleston Square!’ Trollope was referring to the perils of Pimlico, the development of terraced houses master-minded by that great Victorian entrepreneur Thomas Cubitt as a less aristocratic version of Belgravia—and, as ever, Trollope got it right. Echoing other neighbourhoods in Victorian London, their streets lined with terraces, Pimlico had aspirations: the area could even be described, by a journalist of 1877, as an ‘abode of gentility’, with ‘a servant or two in the kitchen, birds in the windows, with flowers in boxes, pianos, and the latest fashions, of course’. Some of the inhabitants—those in the squares—kept carriages and wore ‘opera cloaks of surpassing gorgeousness’. But, for the most part, the area never took off.
Houses in the lesser streets descended into multiple occupation—oh, the scorn that Dickens poured on families who had to share a communal front door—by a motley assembly of draper’s clerks, professors of music, ironmongers, dressmakers, men working in the nearby penitentiary on the site of what is now Tate Britain and the inevitable Victorian caste of spinsters and widows. Some of the lodging houses were respectable, but others were not. It acquired a dubious reputation, as revealed by the cavalierly uncompromising estate agent Roy Brooks in his 1985 book Brothel in Pimlico. Passport to Pimlico, made in 1949, was actually filmed over the river in Vauxhall, but Pimlico sounded funnier. It had become something of a joke.
Esta historia es de la edición August 18, 2021 de Country Life UK.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición August 18, 2021 de Country Life UK.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
Happiness in small things
Putting life into perspective and forces of nature in farming
Colour vision
In an eye-baffling arrangement of geometric shapes, a sinister-looking clown and a little girl, Test Card F is one of television’s most enduring images, says Rob Crossan
'Without fever there is no creation'
Three of the top 10 operas performed worldwide are by the emotionally volatile Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, who died a century ago. Henrietta Bredin explains how his colourful life influenced his melodramatic plot lines
The colour revolution
Toxic, dull or fast-fading pigments had long made it tricky for artists to paint verdant scenes, but the 19th century ushered in a viridescent explosion of waterlili
Bullace for you
The distinction between plums, damsons and bullaces is sweetly subtle, boiling down to flavour and aesthetics, but don’t eat the stones, warns John Wright
Lights, camera, action!
Three remarkable country houses, two of which have links to the film industry, the other the setting for a top-class croquet tournament, are anything but ordinary
I was on fire for you, where did you go?
In Iceland, a land with no monks or monkeys, our correspondent attempts to master the art of fishing light’ for Salmo salar, by stroking the creases and dimples of the Midfjardara river like the features of a loved one
Bravery bevond belief
A teenager on his gap year who saved a boy and his father from being savaged by a crocodile is one of a host of heroic acts celebrated in a book to mark the 250th anniversary of the Royal Humane Society, says its author Rupert Uloth
Let's get to the bottom of this
Discovering a well on your property can be viewed as a blessing or a curse, but all's well that ends well, says Deborah Nicholls-Lee, as she examines the benefits of a personal water supply
Sing on, sweet bird
An essential component of our emotional relationship with the landscape, the mellifluous song of a thrush shapes the very foundation of human happiness, notes Mark Cocker, as he takes a closer look at this diverse family of birds