The British History website (visit
link) tells of the development that took place in Iverna Court and Iverna
Gardens:
"The august houses of The Terrace with their long
gardens behind (page 100) continued undisturbed until the forces of commerce
proved irresistible. Renewals of leases were gradually co-ordinated to expire in
1893, in which year the heirs of William Mair sold the freehold of the whole for
a reputed £170,000 to Jubal Webb, who since 1886 had been in residence at No. 2
The Terrace.
Jubal Webb was a prosperous High Street cheesemonger
and provision merchant with a flair for publicity (his telegraphic address was
‘Gorgonzola, London’, and in 1893 he exhibited the largest known cheese at the
Chicago World's Fair). Webb also had a far from disinterested experience of
local politics. A long-standing vestryman, he briefly sat on the Metropolitan
Board of Works; he might have been elected also to its successor, the London
County Council, had not his opponents dug-up an incident of 1880 when Webb, then
High Constable, appeared before the magistrates for attempting to extort fees
from applicants for licences and escaped only through the skills of the
celebrated Serjeant Ballantine. According to Arthur Cates, the surveyor to
the Office of Woods and Forests, Webb ‘by his local influence’ was able to
redevelop the Terrace estate and carry out street improvements ‘which others on
behalf of the Estate had failed to accomplish’.
Webb began by dividing the estate in two. He elected
first to develop the frontage towards the High Street where The Terrace itself
stood, and then to deal with the gardens behind. For the frontage, he arranged a
long building lease of the whole with Edward Jarvis Cave, a builder of Old Broad
Street. Here Cave promptly in 1893–4 erected Nos. 129–161 (odd) Kensington High
Street to the designs of Boehmer and Gibbs, the architects acting for Webb.
Known at first as The Promenade, it is an orthodox, restless, ornamental range
of shops and flats in the late Queen Anne style, built of red brick with copious
stone dressings. There is a quasi-detached arch at the side facing Wright's
Lane, shielding the tradesmen's passage behind the shops. Webb sold the freehold
of this block with the ground rents to the Crown in 1894 for £93,581.
Behind, the gardens of the old houses constituted an
L-shaped block hemmed in by Cheniston Gardens. One of the gardens stretched
almost to Abingdon Villas, where Nos. 9 and 11 on the north side formed part of
Webb's purchase in 1893, having presumably been bought by the previous owners
with a view to future development. Their demolition allowed an exit road to be
built through the estate to the south along the backs of the houses in Cheniston
Gardens.
A preliminary layout of June 1894 showed an arrangement
with a square at the centre, like that eventually built. However this first
idea, devised by the architects Boehmer and Gibbs, indicated broad-fronted
houses round the square, further houses along the west side of the road leading
out to the south (then to be called Terrace Gardens) and shops along the west
side of Wright's Lane. The layout was soon afterwards revised by Boehmer and
Gibbs, and the name Iverna Gardens adopted from a list ‘given in your office
amongst others to select from’, as the architects told the London County
Council. Flats were now considered along with houses, in line with the
exigencies of development hereabouts at this period. The layout was agreed with
the L.C.C. and the Kensington Vestry, who compensated Webb to the tune of no
less than £5,693 for a strip allowing them to widen Wright's Lane.
Before the end of 1894, probably in an attempt to evade
the more stringent building regulations due to come into effect in the new year,
work briefly began on the two southernmost blocks of flats in Iverna Gardens
(Nos. 1–20) and was announced for other sites as well. But all activity soon
came to a halt, perhaps because of a glut of high-class flats on the market. In
November 1894 there was talk of letting some of the estate for an exhibition
with ‘galleries of pictures and statuary and working examples of a few
manufactures and in the first instance … an Austrian Exhibition with a model of
Old Vienna on the tongue of land extending to Abingdon Villas. There would be a
courtyard opposite a central entrance to be formed in Wright's Lane with a
Concert Hall backing upon the Stables adjoining the “Adam and Eve” public
house.’
Sobriety reasserted itself, and the flats on the west
side of Iverna Gardens were recommenced in September 1895 by a new builder,
Richmond Nurse, to designs by Boehmer and Gibbs acting in conjunction with the
speculating architect C. J. C. Pawley. They aroused the displeasure of several
householders in Cheniston Gardens, who feared the height of the new buildings
and were annoyed by a high screen which Webb had erected against their back
walls. The original two blocks (Nos. 1–20) were completed and leased in 1896–7
to Thomas Hinckley Pankhurst, contractor, and were followed by three identical
successors (Nos. 21–50), built by Nurse and other builders and leased in 1898 to
Pawley. (ref. 51) Early prospectuses refer to these flats as ‘replete with every
modern convenience, including Telephones, messenger boxes, passenger and
tradesmen's lifts’, as well as ‘electric light, liveried attendants’. Rents were
from between £125 to £150 per annum.
Meanwhile in October 1895 Webb tried to sell off in
lots the freehold not yet bespoken. The elaborate auction catalogue showed
suggested elevations by Boehmer and Gibbs and C. J. C. Pawley for the Wright's
Lane frontage, where shops were still intended. But the sale was a flop; none of
the plots reached its reserve.
No further activity occurred here until 1898, when
Henry Metcalf and Thomas Greig, two architect-surveyors who specialized in
flat-building through their Mansions Estate Company, agreed to take on the rest
of the land and build high flats all round the ‘square’. As and when each block
was completed, Webb seems to have agreed to sell the freehold. Pleading for
exemption from some clauses of the building acts, Metcalf and Greig assured the
L.C.C. that the flats would be occupied ‘at good fair rentals none less than
£180 per annum by people in excellent positions … no expense will be spared in
making Iverna Gardens an ideal healthy and sanitary place of residence’. Later,
they again emphasized, ‘there is not the slightest vestige of possibility of
their ever becoming tenanted by Artisans or the Working Classes’. The square was
to present ‘an artistic and uniform appearance’, with a fountain, rockery and
shrubbery in the centre. The flats so built were at first to be called Iverna
Mansions but soon acquired their present name, Iverna Court. Metcalf and Greig
started with Block 1 at the south corner of the approach road from Wright's
Lane. This was in progress under R. Hockley and Son, builders, in 1898, but as
it has the date 1901 over the door it presumably took three years to finish. In
1899–1900 the architects were preparing to build blocks to the south of this one
in Wright's Lane (the site of the Christian Science Church) and on the south of
the square (the site of St. Sarkis's Church and Vicarage), but these did not
proceed. Instead, they finished their contribution with the five blocks Nos. 2–6
on the north and west sides of the square, started in 1900 and completed
probably in 1903, at least in part by Thomas Boyce, builder.
Architecturally, the flats numbered in Iverna Gardens
are pleasanter and more disciplined than those of Iverna Court. They have only
four main storeys above ground, and their amalgam of Queen Anne gables, bays,
windows with white sash-bars, leaded lights and portentous Baroque porches is
deft and ingenuous enough to pass muster. In contrast, the precipitous facades
and bludgeoning details of Iverna Court give to this corner of Kensington a
moody quality reminiscent of certain backwaters of Manhattan. All these flats
have six full storeys, with gables and other features (mostly now mutilated)
thrusting high above the cornice line. Metcalf and Greig's first block, No. 1,
is conspicuously more ornamental than its successors, which are grimmer and
plainer except for some decorative glass in the ground-floor windows. The only
real variation is at Block 5 in the north-west corner, which has Tudor-Gothic
features elongated upwards in the most approved American manner.
The central area in the ‘square’ in front of Iverna
Court was inevitably in the end left plain and gravelled, with a few trees but
no garden. Later a circular flower bed and grass plot were inserted. The present
arrangement dates from 1971, when local residents banded together to devise a
pleasant layout of flowers, shrubs and seats.
On the south side of the square and the west side of
Wright's Lane, the sites not taken up by Metcalf and Greig were still empty at
the time of Jubal Webb's death in December 1901. In 1904 his son and heir Dudley
Unite Webb was dabbling with a proposal for a theatre for the Wright's Lane
site, which would ‘of course be in the very best Theatrical artitectural [sic]
style and in keeping with the traditions of Kensington as the Royal Suburb’. No
more came of this than of the exhibition promoted ten years before. "