Lübeck's in the air

When aesthete Harold Peto met 'modest and retiring' Ernest George, the London skyline turned into a riot of German, Flemish and Dutch gables that delighted and horrified people in equal measure, as Carla Passino discovers

BRITAIN ends in Harrington Gardens. Although white stucco behemoths and choleric London brick buildings make a perfunctory appearance, there’s an air of Northern Europe to this South Kensington Street— a triumph of straight, scroll and stepped gables that could have come straight from Bruges or Lübeck. Borrowing designs from the early-Renaissance buildings of Flanders, Holland and Germany was the inspired idea of architects Ernest George and Harold Peto, who collaborated to create this slice of Kensington & Chelsea.

Of the two, Peto would later become more celebrated, but, when Harrington Gardens was built, George was the more experienced. The son and grandson of ironmongers, he had discovered an interest in architecture at an early age—‘I… plotted to scale the school house and grounds, and persuaded my parents I should like to become an architect,’ he recalled in The Builder in 1921. In 1861, he opened his own practice in partnership with Thomas Vaughan, with whom he would go on to design, among others, a villa in Spain for the 2nd Duke of Wellington and Rousdon, the Devon home of biscuit magnate Sir Henry Peek.