Eye-Catchers

Peter Campbell

• Survey of London: Vol. XLII. Southern Kensington: Kensington to Earls Court
  Athlone, 502 pp, £55.00, May 1986, ISBN 0 485 48242 8
• Follies: A National Trust Guide by Gwyn Headley and Wim Meulenkamp
  Cape, 564 pp, £15.00, June 1986, ISBN 0 224 02105 2
• The Botanists by David Elliston Allen
  St Paul’s Bibliographies, 232 pp, £15.00, May 1986, ISBN 0 906795 36 2
• British Art since 1900 by Frances Spalding
  Thames and Hudson, 252 pp, £10.50, April 1986, ISBN 0 500 23457 4
• Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760-1900 by Richard Altick
  Ohio State, 527 pp, £55.00, March 1986, ISBN 0 8142 0380 9
• History of the British Pig by John Wiseman
  Duckworth, 118 pp, £12.95, May 1986, ISBN 0 7156 1987 X

The earliest buildings in the 42nd volume of the Survey of London are late 17th and early 18th-century houses in Kensington Square. The market gardens and nurseries which surrounded this urban housing disappeared rather slowly, as land to the south of Kensington High Street was developed. The modest scale of the brick houses of Kensington Square, the neat brick and stucco of Edwardes Square (1811-25) and the Italian-villa-like elevations of Launceton Place (1840-3) gave way to cliffs of Italianate stucco (like Cornwall Gardens, late 1860s) and the red-and-yellow-brick mansion blocks of the 1880s and 1890s. These now dominate: this is Victorian London.