Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 1 (2005), p. 111

This volume covers a small area, a wedge-shaped parish 660 acres in extent in 1900 after small detached portions had been relocated. The southern boundary is the Thames and small tributaries define its western and eastern extent. The surface geology is predominantly Kempton Park gravel over London clay, with some brickearth and silt. The whole parish lies under the ten metre contour. The village which gave the parish its name originated on the Thames bank, a Saxon settlement whose earliest record dates from 785. Mercian kings were thought to have resided at Chelsea in the eighth century, and through the succeeding centuries the parish was a retreat from London and Westminster for royalty, aristocracy and rich citizenry. The building of the grand Royal Hospital in 1680s attracted further well-to-do settlement. In the eighteenth century Chelsea had a reputation as a suburban resort, with pleasure gardens 112 the agricultural and inns in a pleasing riverside setting. Artists were also attracted to the picturesque rural village, and remained when, in the nineteenth century, it lost all agriculture and became a London suburb. Much of the volume describes urban Chelsea but here I will concentrate on the agriculture which preceded bricks and mortar.

The medieval manor of Chelsea was roughly coterminous with the parish. For two periods, 1376–70 and in the mid-fifteenth century, the demesne was held by Westminster Abbey. In the first period barley was the main crop, followed by rye and wheat, then oats and a few acres of mixed grains and vetches. Grain not saved for seed or consumed at home was sent to the Abbey’s granary or to Battersea and one has the sense that the food demands of London and Westminster, just down the river, were already being felt. Big changes occurred in the seventeenth century, when closes and the two open fields were increasingly turned over to commercial gardening to serve the metropolis or went out of agriculture as formal gardens and parkland attached to residences of incoming gentry and nobility.

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries Chelsea was one of a number of parishes near London where vegetables, fruit and nursery produce became of major importance. Unlike the Neat Houses in neighbouring Westminster, where closes of predominantly wet-pasture were converted to gardens, most of Chelsea’s vegetables were grown in the open fields, by husbandmen who incorporated spade-cultivated vegetables, particularly roots, into their more traditional grain-based farming. These farmer-gardeners dispensed with fallows, relying on copious amounts of dung from the nearby city to refresh the soil. As elsewhere near London, commercial gardens were eventually superseded by buildings but high rents for garden ground ensured that the open fields of Chelsea, like those of Fulham, survived into the nineteenth century. The gradual encroachment of gardening into Chelsea farming is well described in the section on agriculture but there is no discussion of who the first gardeners were or what was the process of innovation.

Chelsea was particularly famed for its nursery gardens. Beginning probably towards the end of the seventeenth century, the business was well-established by the mid-eighteenth century, supplying a local, national and international market. Nurserymen needed only small areas of land to ply their trade and lasted longer than market gardeners in the area: many opened showrooms in the Kings Road where the larger firms survived into the twentieth century.

There are informative short histories of the leading nursery firms in this volume and from these one can understand the highly specialized nature of this trade. history review James Veitch & Sons sent plant hunters to China, produced many important hybrids, and worked with scientific institutions. Joseph Knight, who began trading in Chelsea in 1808, had a large collection of exotic plants housed in a conservatory and other buildings. These businesses were supplying exotic and novel plants to the fashion-conscious gentry; no wonder they could pay rents which kept the builders at bay for so long.

There are some faults in this volume. E.J.Willson is misquoted on p.152. She wrote that a Frenchman in Chelsea was said to have first grown lettuces successfully in England on a large scale in the mid-eighteenth century; the words ‘on a large scale’ are omitted here making the statement nonsense. The proof-reader has overlooked the garbled sentence on p.166 beginning, ‘In 1886 it was destroyed by fire in 1807...’. A more serious problem is the disappointing maps. There are no maps of market gardening and nursery-ground. Use could have been made of eighteenth and nineteenth century maps to show the spread, and decline, of gardening in the parish, including Thomas Milne’s detailed land-use map of 1800. Five of the ten maps and plans are sections of the Ordnance Survey map depicting Chelsea c. 1865. Use of this map has merit but the reproduction is poor: the text is too small to read and the sections of map are grey and indistinct. In contrast, the illustrations in the book are plentiful and well-chosen.

Any criticisms are outweighed by the large amount ofcareful scholarship in this volume which will be welcomed by historians of London and its suburbs.