Chard Estate Agents - Chelsea area guide

Chelsea, SW3 / SW10

Chelsea is glamorous, high-end, fashionable and nowadays, extremely expensive. Its main thoroughfare is the Kings Road and it also includes Sloane Square and the lower half of Sloane Street, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea Embankment, Lots Road and Chelsea Harbour.

Although a wealthy enclave from the seventeenth century, Chelsea has always had a far more raffish, arty reputation than neighbouring Belgravia and has never been exactly sedate. The Kings Road became famous in the 1960s for its fashion boutiques, including the notorious Sex punk fashion shop at the Fulham end. In the 1980s, however, Chelsea started to lose its ‘swinging’ image, possibly because of the increasingly high price of property there.  And the Kings Road, although phenomenally busy, is no longer quite as trendy as it was in the days of the groovy boutiques, but it still houses many of the more upmarket fashion shops, such as Next, Jaeger, Jigsaw and Kew. The department store Peter Jones, at the Sloane Square end, remains the shopping mecca of the Chelsea Set. The store’s recent facelift has made it one of the nicest, most shopper-friendly shops in the capital. 

The new landscaped shopping and eating area off Sloane Square has some of the prettiest shops and restaurants in London, and further down the Kings Road there is the trendy, celebrity-haunted Bluebird restaurant.

It used to be the aim of 1960s with-it teenagers to be seen walking down the King’s Road on a Saturday but these days most of the shoppers seem to be expensively-dressed, highly fashionable women in their 30s and 40s. In its arty heyday, Chelsea was home to London’s bohemians and artists, radicals, painters and poets, although nowadays it is mainly investment bankers and established celebrities who live in the highly expensive but pretty renovated and interior-designed terrace houses off the King’s Road. Cheyne Walk, on the Embankment, where the pre-Raphaelite movement began, is now  particularly expensive but there are some 1960s local authority blocks there as well.  

You can feel you are in good company as a huge mixture of the famous, notorious and talented have chosen Chelsea for their London homes.  These are a mixed bag and have included: Agatha Christie, Johnny Depp, Judy Gardland, Bob Geldof, Hugh Grant, Bob Marley, Gwyneth Paltrow, suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, artist J.M.W.Turner, Mark Twain, Paula Yates, and Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkien.

There are many mansion blocks in Chelsea and also small terraced houses as well as modern blocks and large family homes. Most of the housing stock is Victorian or Edwardian and is defined as ‘ultra prime London’. Off the Kings Road there are a number of Georgian terraces, such as those found in Markham Street and Bywater street. These houses are long and narrow and have often been extended up and down, with roof gardens and basement extensions.

You can’t, really, get much better than Chelsea for shops, restaurants, clubs – Princes William and Harry are frequently pictured falling out of Chelsea nightclubs at 3am – and Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie have properties in the area, so some say that Chelsea is getting young again, at least for the trust-fund beneficiaries.

Much of Chelsea belongs to the Cadogan Estate, and this means there is always a wide choice of rental properties as there is little freehold property in the area.

Although Chelsea is built up, it has a serene uncrowded air and many green, open spaces such as Albert Bridge Gardens, Chelsea Embankment Gardens, the Royal Hospital Chelsea (home of the Chelsea Pensioners), Battersea Bridge Gardens and the intriguing Chelsea Physic Garden, well worth a visit.