Why So Many Earls Court Homes Are Flats, and What That Means If You Want to Extend
Earls Court has a split personality that catches homeowners out. From the street, it looks like a district of grand houses. Tall stucco-fronted terraces march around beautiful garden squares like Earls Court Square, Nevern Square and Philbeach Gardens. But step inside most of them and you find something different: flats. The great majority of these houses were divided into mansion and conversion flats long ago. This overview from Architects in Earls Court is a good primer, and the house-or-flat question is the one that shapes everything here. The flat-heavy reality Earls Court is unusually flat-heavy, even by central London standards. The grand mid-Victorian terraces around the garden squares were built as single houses, then subdivided during the twentieth century into apartments and mansion-block-style flats. Add the purpose-built red-brick mansion blocks on streets like Nevern Square and Old Brompton Road, and the result is a district where most homes are leasehold flats rather th...