Lyncroft Mansions

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History

We Know Lyncroft Mansions

Up until the 1890s most of the land north of West End Green and around Fortune Green belonged to the Flitcroft estate. Lyncroft Mansions follows the line of a footpath across the grounds, formerly Woodbine Cottage at the south-eastern corner of the estate.

In 1894 Woodbine Cottage was sold to a group of local speculators who demolished the villa and built Lyncroft Gardens across its grounds.

From 1896 Edward Jarvis Cave, one of the district's most prominent builders started building houses and blocks of flats in Lyncroft Gardens.

Built in 1898, Lyncroft Mansions was one of the earliest mansion blocks constructed.

Immediately there was a controversy about Lyncroft Mansions. By coincidence another builder called Edward Cave, based at Dunster Gardens in Kilburn, had already built houses on the northern side of Lyncroft Gardens numbering them conventionally with odd numbers from 1 to 59 Lyncroft Gardens. Edward Jarvis Cave then built his flats on the opposite, south-east side of the road calling them consecutively 1 to 51 Lyncroft Mansions. After complaints by local residents about the confusion Edward Jarvis Cave’s flats were renumbered with just even numbers from 2 to 102 Lyncroft Gardens.
For this reason Lyncroft Mansions was initially called Lyncroft Gardens and this was so until about 1901.

Edward Jarvis Cave built Lyncroft Mansions as low-rise flats over three storeys and this was quite a novelty in London at the time. The architects of Lyncroft Mansions were Edward Boehmer and Percy Gibbs. Long associated with Edward J Cave’s enterprises Boehmer and Gibbs built up a considerable reputation since the 1890s as designers of fashionable and grand mansion blocks on the continental model.

According to Charles Booth’s ‘poverty map’ of the 1890s Lyncroft Gardens was occupied by ‘middle-class, well-to-do’ residents.

We Know Lyncroft Gardens

Lyncroft Gardens is typical of a class of street name that came into vogue when Hampstead’s landowning families, who had farmed their estates for generations and had no knowledge of how to develop them, sold out to the land companies. These companies had no interest in preserving the names of the estates and in some cases the developers would name a batch of streets after the directors of their company or their country homes. Generally the developer’s main aim in naming streets was to give an impression of a genteel and desirable place to live.

The name of Lyncroft Gardens was approved in 1895 and officially adopted in 1900.

The actor Richard Wilson, perhaps best known for grumpy Victor Meldrew in the TV series One Foot in the Grave, lived in a bed sitter in 25 Lyncroft Gardens from 1959 to 1965.

We Know Mansion Blocks

The first Mansion Blocks were built in the early 19th Century, providing luxurious residences for the growing urban upper middle classes. As the Industrial Revolution spread throughout Europe it brought about a population boom in the major cities, and Mansion Blocks were devised to provide luxurious housing for wealthy white collar workers.

As the centre of the cities became increasingly crowded, the blocks provided this growing class with housing that boasted impressive entrances, generous elevations and balconies reminiscent of mansions.

They were a particularly popular innovation in polite Parisian society. In spite of their popularity on the continent, Londoners were initially sceptical about this new style of accommodation. In the 1850s a spacious Mansion flat would set back the buyer somewhere in the order of £50-£200 per annum, but the idea of living in such a communal manner was entirely contradictory to the dominant Victorian social ideals of the age.

Firstly, and most importantly,
apartment dwellings were simply not considered ‘proper’, but it was not just a case of old English snobbery; there was also widely held fear that this new type of residence would increase the risk of burglary and the spread of infection and disease.

By the 1880s London society had gradually warmed to the idea and the decade was marked by a flurry of Mansion Block construction across the city.

We Know West Hampstead

Renowned for evading the public eye, Belsize Park was a historical secret until 1317 when Edward II’s Lord Chief Justice left 57 acres of land to the monks of Westminster. During these times Belsize was a sub-division of the manor of Hampstead and the church let out parcels of land to those they saw fit to build country mansions on their glorious estate.

The first streets of Belsize were laid in the 1850s and from 1870 to 1900 many of the surviving stretches of greenery eroded as main thoroughfares developed. While Belsize Park remained an “in between area”, set between the hustling heart of the city and the smaller nucleus of Hampstead, an influx of the “comfortably-off conferred upon this area of London an identity of a kind…” (Saint, A. 2000).

The term Belsize – first applied in the early 18th Century – was adapted from the French term Bel Assis, meaning ‘beautifully situated’. Belsize Park was coined in 1870 when property developer Daniel Tidey orchestrated an extensive construction project in the area. Two hundred years later and the name is more appropriate than ever.