Knightsbridge Living
Walton Street
Walton Street contains a mixture of houses, shops and restaurants. The houses are a variety of mainly white stuccoed, two storey terraced houses. There is also a more modern development on the north side consisting of a terrace of three storey houses with stucco up to first floor levels. The street also contains the local police station.
Only the section containing Nos. 2-32 (even) falls within the Wellcome Trust Estate. This is a range of virtually identical houses bracketed at each end by a larger pair, and with a larger house in the very centre at number 16. All the houses have stuccoed facades.
Taking the majority of the houses first, the houses are quite close to the street, so the front garden is only large enough for a couple of tubs before you reach the area and a basement.
Most of the houses are built in pairs with shared porch structures. No. 4 has a single porch and the grouping of porches began with Nos. 6 and 8. The porches are a pastiche on the traditional Greek columns. Four plain columns with volute capitals, two feet in front of the building, support a lintel like the entablature on a Greek temple.
There are stairs up to the front door. The large main window next to the door opens onto a small balcony cantilevered over the area.
On the first floor, there are two windows. A main window is positioned over the ground floor window. Above the porch, the house face is set back slightly with a small windows in the recess which is framed with quoins. A cornice on brackets runs along the front of the houses above first floor level. There is a second floor built into a slated dormer roof, whose windows look past a parapet wall.
The houses at each end have two extra main floors, a second and a third, separated by a similar cornice on brackets, with a fifth floor dormer roof and window.
The “central” house, number 16, is not in fact in the centre. It has one extra main floor, the second, with a dormer roof and window at third floor level, but it is not as high as the end houses. If you look closely you see that for a balanced appearance, the double porch has orphan columns between it and No 18.
