Knightsbridge Living
Egerton Crescent
Egerton Crescent is a longer range of houses than Pelham Crescent because there is no break in the middle (as there is with Pelham Place). The terrace has twenty-four houses. Each house has two bays and a frontage of about twenty four feet. Superficially they look very much like the Pelham Crescent houses. Most have a basement, three main storeys, and garrets within a mansard roof. The two houses in the centre share a pitch roof and a full attic storey and they share a parapet.
For variety, a different type of house appears at intervals along the terrace. These are built slightly in front of the general building line of the terrace. They have four normal storeys from ground up and they have a hipped roof. These houses have quoins at the sides and triple windows at first and second-floor level. The first floor windows have pilasters with anthemion-and-palmette capitals and a full entablature. The second floor windows are wide triple sash windows.
What all the houses in the terrace share are the stuccoed façades, a continuous cornice above the third storey. They all have are casement windows at ground and first floor level, opening (in the case of the ground floor windows) on to balconettes with iron railings in the form of straight bars with clusters of leaves at the top and bottom
The balconies of the individual houses are joined, except for the projecting houses, which have individual balconies. In all cases, however, the balcony railings have the same pattern as the balconette railings.
The porches have half-sunk Ionic columns and are identical along the terrace. But entrance doors alternate between single and shared porches.
The varieties which were introduced indicate an elaboration of the Pelham Crescent architectural design.
Egerton Crescent has wings at each end. There were five houses to each group, numbered Nos. 26-30 on the west and Nos. 55-59 on the east, but Nos. 26 and 27 were destroyed in the war and the site is now taken by a block of flats. The houses are of a rather different design from the Crescent houses, partly because they are straight terraces not crescents. The three houses in the middle of the original construction were three storey houses with basements and garrets, while the two outer houses had four storeys and basements. They all have Ionic porticos and small gardens at the front. The first floor windows have straight, bracketed hoods.
