Chelsea Manor Court

In 1931, while Chelsea’s small terraced houses were being swept away for ‘gigantic blocks of flats’ aimed at the well-heeled, the Peabody Trust quietly erected something different on Manor Street: 111 self-contained flats for working families, each with its own toilet and scullery. Architect Victor Wilkins designed eight brick blocks that spoke a different language than their ornate neighbors, no frills, just function.

Rents ran from five shillings a week for a single room to thirteen shillings and six pence for four. A German bomb hit the estate in September 1940, killing one resident and wounding several others. Five years later, the same courtyard held a party marking the war’s end. The flats got their bathrooms only in the 1970s, when modernisation trimmed the count from 111 down to 103. Chelsea, meanwhile, kept building upward and outward around them: nearby Chesil Court went up in 1936, an Art Deco block marketed with the slogan “Where you would like to live.” Manor Street’s own answer to that question had already been built, five years earlier, with rather less fanfare.