This is the King's Road, Chelsea's classic cultural artery.
Here are ten mini-posts about the famous street and what I saw there yesterday.
1) The King in question was Charles II who had it built as a private road to speed his passage to Kew Palace. Access was later extended to the nobility but only if they were in possession of a special token, with plebs forced to travel via the parallel Fulham Road instead. Only in 1830 was the King's Road fully opened up to allcomers, kickstarting wider development in Chelsea, and it's remained a tad posh ever since.
2) It goes on a bit, over a mile and a half, not just the full width of Kensington & Chelsea but a deep nudge into Hammersmith & Fulham. The east end is at Sloane Square and by the time you get to the other end at Sands End the house/shop numbers are up to 646. It then switches to being New King's Road and ends up in the 400s, but Mary Quant barely troubled the Fulham end so I'm ignoring that.
3) King's Road might one day have a Crossrail station, although the project's on ice until sufficient funding is available which is likely never. A Chelsea-Hackney line was first proposed as a tube line in 1970 and came closest to reality in a 2015 consultation linking Broxbourne to inner Surrey. Alas Crossrail 2 was mothballed in 2020 but various buildings opposite Chelsea Town Hall remain safeguarded as entrances and worksites just in case, this the sole stop between Victoria and Clapham Junction. I don't expect The Head of Oscar Wilde by Eduardo Paolozzi will ever need to be moved.
4) Two rooms at the Saatchi Gallery are currently showing brief exhibitions before a six month street art blockbuster opens in November. One room's sponsored by Winsor & Newton who asked artists to submit watercolours on a postcard and are displaying hundreds and hundreds on white shelves. I enjoyed them, mostly because there are so many I could always find several I liked, but not so much that I'd want to bid for any in the follow-up charity auction. The other gallery houses ArtEvol 2026, a salon-style exhibition curated by the London Art Collective, and includes works by Schafernaker and 87 non-meteorologists. Visit before 11th October otherwise it's £25 until May.
5) Some famous addresses along the King's Road include number 203 (the electronics shop where Neil Tennant first met Chris Lowe, now part of The Ivy restaurant), number 213 (where Thomas Arne wrote Rule Britannia, still a private home) and number 430 (Malcolm McLaren's Sex boutique, still a Vivienne Westwood outlet).
6) Down at World's End I was intrigued by this breakfast menu outside the Mona Lisa Cafe. What on earth is a Liver Breakfast, or rather I know what it is because the components are listed but why on earth would a cooked breakfast include calf's liver? I've since discovered it's because the Mona Lisa has been here for over 50 years and specialises in 'English breakfasts & Italian faves', in a proper classic caff style so fried offal is very much what you might get with your bacon and eggs. I've found a photo and actually it looks temptingly good, particularly if I then smothered it in ketchup, but £14.95 still feels like a very SW10 price for a cooked breakfast.
7) Not in the King's Road but up a sideroad I spotted a blue plaque for Joyce Grenfell nextdoor to a blue plaque for Sir Stafford Cripps. He was born at 32 Elm Park Gardens and she lived happily in a flat at 34 fron 1957 to 1979. That's already more blue plaques than in the whole of Havering, Hillingdon and Sutton (0, 0 and 1 respectively) whereas Kensington and Chelsea has 195. Close by are AA Milne, Dame Sybil Thorndyke, Evelyn De Morgan, Jean Rhys and Rosalind Franklin, and score 10 points if you know why all of these people are famous.
8) Just off the King's Road I saw one of the very first numberplates 2R on a seven year-old Mini Cooper. R2 is on a Rolls Royce Phantom which feels more appropriate, although I've never seen that.
9) I thought these consecutive bus stops were a particularly good example of the revised digit spacing TfL introduced about ten years ago. The first shows the original spacing where the 1s were close together and had a serif, and the second shows the current idiom where the 1s are further apart. Not everyone liked the new spacing, especially Men Who Like Buses But Get Angry About Change.
10) The King's Road on a Sunday morning is all posh people buying coffee, also posh people buying matcha and sounding excited about it, also posh people buying pastries at Gail's and walking home to share them with the family, also jogging down the pavement in £200 sunglasses, also sitting down with Eggs Benedict in a cute cafe, also so much long blond hair and designer casuals and rugby shirts and impeccable jackets and boxfresh trainers, also lifestyle boutiques, also wellness clinics, also shops that get by because posh people are never fully happy with their interior design, also smart outlets that exist solely to siphon off disposable income from top taxbracket earners and if you're a bit socialist it's all a bit triggering, especially when compared to how folk in Harlesden or Dalston are getting by, almost as if when the revolution starts it should start here, not that I think like that but it's all too easy to compare Chelsea's easy excess with the lives of the urban majority and conclude that inequality is endemic and perhaps when Charles II built a private road the trappings never quite went away.
