London’s Alleys: Skinners Place, SW1

Around the back of Sloane Square tube station is this short rather fine passageway that was once a lot longer until the railway sliced through the middle of it.

Skinners Place is about 200 years old, having been laid out in the late 1820s as the area developed from fields into the posh housing that dominates Chelsea today. You can see half the alley laid out in this Greenwood map from 1828, but looking like it was going to be called Union Street. Half the survives today although at the time, it only appears on the map as a dotted line in the fields.

Greenwood Map 1828

The full road was eventually completed, and an interesting complaint from the 1860s revealed that the road was blocked by a fence and that the resident on the corner was charging £1 per year for permission to use it. Apart from the complaint, it’s noted that the Ranelagh sewer—today better known as the Westbourne River—was still open to the air.

The naming seems confusing, with maps and newspaper articles using both Skinners Street and Skinners Place. However, I lean towards it always being officially Skinners Place as that was used more often in adverts, and there’s no formal change of name that I can find.

However, the alley didn’t last to its full extent for long, because in 1868, Sloane Square tube station sliced through the road as part of the extension of the District Railway between South Kensington and Westminster.

The tube station was almost entirely destroyed in November 1940 by a WWII bomb and the station was later rebuilt in its current design.

An interesting quirk is that before the station was rebuilt there was what was likely a temporary footbridge over the tracks, that aligned perfectly with the back of the alley, so it’s possible there was an emergency exit linking the station into Skinners Place.

OS map 1949

Through all this turmoil in the station next door, Skinners Place seemed to exist untouched. The short row of houses on the north side seems the same as they have ever been. However, the freestanding house at the end of the alley looks similar to the rest, but is actually a modern replacement for an older building that was demolished in the middle of the 1990s. A photo of the old house is here.

As you approach the end of the alley, the most obvious thing to do is listen out for the trains on the other side of the fence. And because of the railway, you’re now at a dead-end and have to walk back to where you started again.