Until about 1760, the parish of Kensington was little more than a scattering of houses on either side of a stretch of road, which later became Brompton Road. These few houses were surrounded by large tracts of agricultural land.
There was a turnpike road which linked London with the villages of Chelsea and Fulham and then continued over Putney Bridge into Surrey. This is the route followed by Brompton Road and Fulham Road today. (The modern straight line from Brompton Road to Cromwell Road and west out of London did not exist. Cromwell Road was only built in the 1850s, as part of the great Victorian museum development. It was not until after the Second World War that it was finally connected with Hammersmith and Talgarth Road.)
The turnpike road was called the road to Fulham or the road to Brompton. From 1726 to 1826 it was maintained by the Kensington Turnpike Trustees. Brompton was the name of a village just west of where South Kensington tube station stands today. The houses were mainly built along a lane which turned off the Brompton-Fulham turnpike road towards Earls Court. The lane was known as Brompton Lane or Bell and Horns Lane, after an inn on the corner (opposite the Brompton Oratory today). In time, Brompton grew as a result of house building along the road towards London, so the original Brompton village was re-named Old Brompton, and Brompton Lane became today’s Old Brompton Road. (Later, the eastern end of Old Brompton Road was re-named Thurloe Place.)
Brompton Road was what the local people called the stretch of road from Knightsbridge to Old Brompton Road. It was not officially named Brompton Road until 1863. Brompton Road did not originally include (as it does now) the curve down from Thurloe Place to the crossroads at Pelham Street and Sloane Avenue (near the Conran Shop) which was then still Fulham Road. In 1935, that stretch of road became part of Brompton Road, and the start of Fulham Road was pushed back to its present position.
Until 1760, apart from some sporadic house building along the roads, the land was mainly horticultural. Brompton and Kensington were excellent agricultural land and most of it was intensively cultivated as nurseries. Property records show that modern Beaufort Gardens, Beauchamp Place and Ovington Square were nurseries. Henry Wise of Brompton Park Nursery was a particularly well-known local property owner of the day.
Apart from walled nursery gardens and cottages, inns made up most of the remaining buildings of the area. They grew ever more numerous as the traveller approached Knightsbridge, which was a hotel area even then. Famous inns of the day included The Bell and Horns (already mentioned), The Swan, standing roughly on the present corner of Brompton Road and Sloane Street, The World’s End (later called The Fulham Bridge) near the present Lancelot Place, and The Rose, on Knightsbridge itself. By 1760 the Knightsbridge and Brompton Road junction was becoming quite built up, with many new houses.