Other districts go in and out of fashion, but the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, particularly the area to the south of Hyde Park, has been in vogue ever since royalty moved into Kensington Palace in the late seventeenth century. Aside from the shops around Harrods in Knightsbridge, however, the popular tourist attractions lie in South Kensington, where three of London’s top free museums — the Victoria and Albert, Natural History and Science museums — stand on land bought with the proceeds of the Great Exhibition of 1851. The following half—century saw the entire borough transformed from fields, farms and private estates into Street after street of ostentatious Italianate terraces, grandiose red—brick mansions and mews houses. This is prime London real estate (among the world’s most expensive) and heartland of the privately educated, wealthy offspring of the middle and upper classes and the rich and famous. Hotels in Kensington London see this page for fantastic discounted rates from Online Discounted Hotels.
Chelsea, bordering the river to the south, also has royal connections, though these date mostly from Tudor times and have left few tangible remains. Since the nineteenth century when artists and writers began to move here in significant numbers, Chelsea’s character has been more bohemian than its neighbours. In the 1960s, the King’s Road carved out its reputation as London’s catwalk, while in the late 1970s it was the unlikely epicentre of the punk explosion. Nothing so risqué goes on in Chelsea now, though its residents like to think of themselves as rather more artistic and intellectual than the purely moneyed types of Kensington. For Hotels in Chelsea London see this page for fantastic discounted rates from Online Discounted Hotels. |
