Eton College's hay fields
For most of its recorded history the ground that Elsworthy Road now crosses was farmland. The greater part of it belonged to Eton College from the fifteenth century onwards, worked as pasture producing hay and manure for London. It was too far north to appear on Rocque's map of 1746. Cary's plan of 1795 shows Primrose Hill as a landmark surrounded by the college's open grassland, with the nearest building a cluster of five small structures at St John's Wood to the south-west.
Eton was slow to develop. The college only became seriously interested in building speculation in the 1820s, by which time development had already moved north on land to either side. John Shaw was appointed principal surveyor in 1825, succeeded by his son in 1832, and an Act of Parliament in 1826 allowed the estate to grant ninety-nine-year building leases.
A cricket ground where the road now bends
The builder Samuel Cuming did much of the early work here, laying out Primrose Hill Road and the regular semi-detached villas of King Henry's Road in the 1860s. He also created the Eton and Middlesex Cricket Ground on the northern edge of Primrose Hill — the reason the eastern end of Elsworthy Road took the alignment it did.
The cricket ground was moved in the mid-1870s to allow the eastern end of Elsworthy Road and the terraced townhouses of Elsworthy Terrace to be built. The Grade II listed Church of St Mary the Virgin went up in the early 1870s at the junction with Primrose Hill Road, and by the end of the 1880s the road was developed from Lower Merton Rise to Primrose Hill Road. No. 25 dates from 1876; Nos. 9-15 are in yellow brick with decorative brick arches.
William Willett's 'Elsworthy Village'
The road's western half is a different creation altogether. In 1890 Eton reached an agreement with William Willett the younger for eleven acres in the south-western corner of the estate — the relocated cricket ground. The initial plan was for around 125 houses. The housing market did not cooperate, and in 1895 the number was cut to sixty larger, more expensive houses, built between 1896 and 1911.
Because the cricket ground was a clear site, Willett could lay out his roads as he wished. He extended Elsworthy Road westwards to meet Avenue Road, and with the new Wadham Gardens formed a tear-drop shaped block enclosing a private communal garden. The estate was originally called the Avenue Road Estate. The roads were broad and curved, with grass verges and low walls topped by privet hedges rather than railings, and wooden gates and gateposts — a deliberately semi-rural street picture that has only partly survived the widening of carriageways for parked cars.
Contemporaries recognised what it was. Raymond Unwin, writing in 1909, called Willett the pioneer of garden suburb development as later practised at Hampstead Garden Suburb, noting that every house in "Elsworthy Village" was architect-designed, grouped for uniformity of effect, and provided with "a little wayside green". Willett is better remembered today for another campaign: he published his daylight saving pamphlet in 1907, died in 1915, and saw the measure enacted only posthumously, in 1916.
Amos Faulkner and the Free Style house
Every house on the Willett stretch has a different design, but the architect for the great majority was Amos Faulkner (1867-1940). The exceptions are No. 33 Elsworthy Road, by Stephenson and Redfern, and No. 2 Wadham Gardens, by Horace Field. Faulkner had worked with Ernest Newton on Willett's Camden Park estate at Chislehurst, and the debt to Richard Norman Shaw and to Bedford Park is plain.
The result is a domestic Free Style rather than orthodox Arts and Crafts. The houses are low, of two or three storeys, in red brick with a horizontal emphasis; the earliest combine brick with vertically hung clay tiles, and later ones bring in half-timbering, roughcast render and neo-Georgian detail. Roofs are steeply pitched and dominant, with tall brick chimneys; gables borrow from Dutch and Queen Anne precedent; windows are small-paned with white glazing bars; doors are wide and sheltered by low pitched porches. Ground-floor plans were generous, and — unusually for London of the period — the houses were built without basements or mews. Nos. 11 and 11a have canopied porches in wrought iron.
Bombs, flats and a temporary lodger
The twentieth century treated the road gently, with exceptions. Sigmund Freud, his wife Martha and their daughter Anna arrived at a flat at 39 Elsworthy Road in June 1938 after leaving Vienna, staying until they moved to Maresfield Gardens in September. Wartime bombing destroyed the Willett house at No. 43, replaced in the 1950s by a four-storey buff-brick block of flats that gained a further storey in the 1980s. No. 27 was rebuilt in the 1960s as four white-rendered houses; Nos. 17-19 were demolished in 1973 and not replaced until 1995.
Two railway tunnels run beneath. The 1879 bore, added to the south of Robert Stephenson's original, passes under St Mary's Church and the rear gardens on the north side of Elsworthy Road; its brick airshaft still stands in the back garden of No. 10 Wadham Gardens.
The Elsworthy Conservation Area was designated on 27 February 1973. It covers roughly 16.4 hectares, running from Primrose Hill Road in the east to Avenue Road in the west, bounded by King Henry's Road to the north and by the northern edge of Primrose Hill to the south — which is also, at Avenue Road, the boundary between the London Borough of Camden and the City of Westminster.