Hammersmith

Morris’s river house, the first electric telegraph, and Matcham’s auditorium rebuilt inside a new shell.

William Morris took the house at 26 Upper Mall in 1878 and named it Kelmscott after his place in Oxfordshire. He held Socialist League meetings in the coach house, started the Kelmscott Press a few doors along, and wrote News from Nowhere with the river outside the window. Before him it belonged to Francis Ronalds, who in 1816 laid eight miles of wire round the garden, sent the first working electric telegraph signals down it, and was told by the Admiralty that telegraphs were wholly unnecessary. Emery Walker, whose lecture on printing set Morris on the path to the Press, lived four doors along at 7 Hammersmith Terrace, and his house is kept as he left it. The bridge is Bazalgette’s of 1887, hung from towers that stand on piers built in 1827 for the suspension bridge before it. The Dove on Upper Mall keeps a front bar that has been measured as the smallest in Britain. King Street runs inland from the Broadway. The Lyric’s auditorium is Frank Matcham’s of 1895, taken apart in the 1970s and rebuilt piece by piece inside a modern building further up the road; the Apollo of 1932 is an art deco cinema that became a concert hall; and the Polish centre halfway along King Street has been the address of Polish London since 1974.

Photo by Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons