London’s Alleys: Hooper’s Court, SW3

This recently revamped Knightsbridge alley has existed on this site ever since the area was first turned from fields into posh shops.

The alley first appears in R Horwood’s map of 1799 as a house-lined passage between North Street and Queen’s Row—today, that’s Basil Street and Brompton Road. It also had a spur off to one side – so more like a T-shaped passage.

R Horwood map 1799

The property estate was developed by a local market gardener, John Hooper — hence Hooper’s Court.

Although the buildings on either side of the alley changed over the years, the alley itself seemed untouched until the early 1900s, when the row of houses on the east was swept away to be replaced by the Basil Street Hotel.

On the corner of the hotel and the alley was an entrance into Knightsbridge tube station, hence the distinctive ox-blood red tiling and arches — although for most of its life, the old entrance had been painted white to match the hotel, so it wasn’t instantly obvious that it was an ex-tube station entrance.

The hotel was built after the station entrance had opened, wrapped around it in a design by Delissa Joseph. The tube entrance closed in the 1930s when the old lifts were replaced with escalators and new entrances on Brompton Road.

The hotel closed in September 2005 as part of the site’s redevelopment. Today, the old tube station entrance has been repurposed into a grand entrance for the residential flats that replaced the hotel.

On the other side is the former Knightsbridge fire station, which closed in 2014. The building was built in a “restrained free Baroque style”, and the lead architects were Owen Fleming and Charles Winmill, who had previously worked for the LCC Housing Department. The upper floors have since been converted to residential use.

The biggest change besides cleaning up the old hotel building has been at the other end of the alley.

Here, an ongoing project to reuse some of the old tube station passages that were closed in the 1930s for a new lift to provide step-free access to Knightsbridge tube station is nearly ready to be opened. So there’s the distinctive tube roundel—it was covered up on my visit—and the classic tube station entrance with the Bostwick gates waiting to be slid open for people to use the station.

However, the new arched tiled corridor is equally interesting, which replaced a rather bland rectangle of an entrance squashed next to the shops.

The dark grey corridor is now a bright and, dare I say it, welcoming space, with large globe lanterns above. It is also enlivened by the floral decoration on the tiles, and although you can’t see it, that floral motif extends inside the new office in Hooper’s Court as decorative detailing in the wood and bronze work.

The decoration reminds us of the time John Hooper was the market gardener here, creating a link between the modern alley and its origins as a farm.