Dr Phene planted London’s first street trees, built an unfinished fantasy chateau, and gave his name to a pub George Best treated as home
The Phene – pronounced “Feeny,” because Chelsea would not have it any other way – sits on a leafy backstreet between the King’s Road and the Embankment, and it is named after one of the great Victorian eccentrics, a man you have never heard of but whose single best idea you walk under every day.
The man who planted the trees
Dr John Samuel Phene was an architect, antiquarian and world traveller who developed much of this corner of Chelsea in the mid-nineteenth century – Oakley Street, Phene Street (named after himself), Margaretta Terrace (named after his wife).
And around 1851, he did something that had essentially never been done in London: he planted trees along the streets, deliberately, to improve the air and, he believed, to help prevent disease.
Before Phene, London streets were bare. The idea of a street as a place with trees down both sides – the thing that now defines every desirable residential road in the city, the thing that adds a fortune to property values, the thing nobody ever thinks about – was, to a real degree, his. He is credited with initiating the planting of street trees in London, an initiative that reportedly influenced Prince Albert. Queen Victoria took notice.
Every plane tree on every London street is, in a sense, his monument, and almost nobody knows his name.
The mad chateau
Phene’s eccentricity was real and it got worse with age. His most notorious project was an elaborate, unfinished mansion at the corner of Oakley Street – a hybrid French chateau and Italian palazzo, encrusted with statues and decoration, which he built from 1901 onward and never completed and, by some accounts, never actually lived in.
It became known locally as the Gingerbread Castle, it was regarded as one of the strangest buildings in London, and it was demolished after his death in 1912. The pub he built to serve his tenants outlived his fantasy palace by more than a century.
George Best’s second home
The Phene has a more recent claim: the Daily Telegraph once called it George Best’s second home. The footballer, who lived nearby, drank here, and the pub was part of the Chelsea and King’s Road scene through the decades when that scene was at its most glamorous and its most self-destructive.
Sixteen hundred and forty-three reviews and a 4.3, a beautiful terrace, and a near-death experience in 2012 when a developer tried to turn it into a fifteen-million-pound house before it was saved.
Verdict
Lovely pub, gorgeous terrace, and a name honouring the eccentric who gave London its street trees and built a gingerbread castle he never finished.
The pub that keeps getting saved
The Phene’s recent history is the recurring Chelsea story of this survey: a beloved local, a developer, a fight, a rescue. In 2012 a property developer applied to turn it into a fifteen-million-pound private house. There was an outcry. In 2013 it was bought by a pub company and saved, and it is now owned by a major brewery.
This has happened to pub after pub in this survey – the Cadogan Arms, the Grenadier, and now the Phene. In the most expensive residential district in the country, a pub is worth more as a house than as a pub, and only public affection and planning law stand between the neighbourhood and the loss of every last one of them.
Verdict
Lovely pub, gorgeous terrace, and a name honouring the eccentric who gave London its street trees and built a gingerbread castle he never finished.
Sit on the terrace, under the trees. He is the reason they are there.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
This is what editorial journalism would read like if written by someone who actually understood what they were criticizing instead of performing concern.