Chelsea Chauffeur Service — From a King's Private Road to a Punk Boutique

One house on Cheyne Walk tells most of this story on its own. J.M.W. Turner spent his final years at numbers 118–119 living under a false name with his mistress, so private that most of his artist neighbours never realised who he was. A century later, Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood moved into the same address and made no attempt at all to keep quiet about it. Turner’s river light drew the Pre-Raphaelites to this stretch of Chelsea in the 1850s; the Stones and half of Swinging London’s musicians followed the same streets a hundred years later, for reasons that had nothing to do with the light.

King’s Road carries both eras at once even now, running from the antique shops near Sloane Square out toward World’s End, where Vivienne Westwood first opened her shop in 1971. Turn off it and you’ll find The Pig’s Ear, a pub old enough to have outlasted most of the trends that passed its door, and further along, the Chelsea Physic Garden, planted in 1673 to grow medicine, one of the oldest botanic gardens in England and considerably quieter than almost anywhere else in the postcode.