Eton College and the Chalcots estate
The name of King Henry's Road is a piece of institutional history rather than local legend. The land belonged to Eton College, and the reference is to Henry VI, the college's founder. Eton came into the Chalcots estate in Hampstead in the fifteenth century, when Henry endowed his new foundation with the property of the hospital of St James; the estate remained with the college even after Henry VIII took the hospital site itself in an exchange in 1531.
That long ownership shaped everything that followed. Eton was a careful, slow landlord, and it held the fields between Chalk Farm and Swiss Cottage until well into the nineteenth century. One consequence is visible from the top of the hill: in 1842 the college exchanged the southern part of Chalcots, some fifty-three acres, for Crown land at Eton, and that southern portion became the public open space of Primrose Hill.
Samuel Cuming builds westward
Development of the rest was neither quick nor smooth. The college obtained an Act in 1826 allowing it to grant ninety-nine-year building leases, and appointed John Shaw, who had worked on St John's Wood, as surveyor. Shaw drew up schemes for detached and semi-detached villas on half-acre plots, and by 1830 a short stretch of what became Adelaide Road had been laid out. Nobody wanted it. The market was saturated and the railway was coming.
The estate only moved when the builder Samuel Cuming took it on. He obtained his first building agreement from the college in 1843 and put up more than a hundred houses on Adelaide Road between 1845 and 1852, mostly stuccoed pairs of three storeys over a basement in a plain late Georgian manner. In 1856 he extended his operations to the western end of the estate, on King Henry's Road, which runs south of and roughly parallel to Adelaide Road. From that point the street is essentially Cuming's, continued by others through the following two decades.
Stock brick, stucco and Corinthian porches
The dominant house type on King Henry's Road is the semi-detached villa in London stock brick with a Corinthian porch. Most of them belong to the 1860s, though the Victoria County History records that sixteen were built later, between 1871 and 1873, and neighbouring streets on the estate produced quite different results: Fellows Road with its close-set grey-brick pairs, Eton Villas and Provost Road with gabled pairs of two storeys and an attic.
The porches are the street's signature and the thing most obviously worth preserving. Camden planning documents describe long runs on King Henry's Road as an intact and relatively unaltered group of high architectural quality forming a consistent townscape, singling out the street-facing entrance porches with their moulded entablatures and Corinthian columns. Runs of these houses appear on the council's local list of buildings of architectural or historic interest, and the eastern end falls within a conservation area, which means alterations to the front elevations are looked at closely.
Artists, a music-hall star and later arrivals
The estate attracted an artistic population from early on, most famously in nearby Steele's Road, but King Henry's Road had its share. The illustrator Arthur Boyd Houghton lived at number 162 from 1866, a succession of artists occupied number 22 from 1873, and there were purpose-built studios at 151A. In 1906 the music-hall star Marie Lloyd was living at number 98.
The twentieth century brought musicians as well: the composer Elizabeth Lutyens and the music educationalist Ernest Read are both recorded among the road's residents in the 1960s. What the street has never really been is uniform in status. Its length carries it from the edge of Primrose Hill to the approaches of Swiss Cottage, and the character shifts as it goes.
The road today
King Henry's Road did not come through the twentieth century untouched. At its western end, number 162 was demolished and replaced by a hotel, and post-war rebuilding elsewhere on the estate interrupted the Victorian grain in places. Eton College's building programme across Chalcots as a whole, continued after Cuming by William Willett and others in red brick during the 1880s and 1890s, was complete by 1913.
What survives on King Henry's Road is a legible sequence: a mid-Victorian speculative street, built to a landlord's standards, in which the brickwork, the porches, the window proportions and the front boundary treatments were all part of a single design intention. That is precisely why alterations here are scrutinised, and why owners restoring these houses usually find that the original detail is better documented than they expect.