BRITAIN ends in Harrington Gardens. Although white stucco behemoths and choleric Londonbrick buildings make a perfunctory appearance, there’s an air of Northern Europe to this South Kensington Street—a triumph of straight, scroll and stepped gables that could have come straight from Bruges or Lübeck. Borrowing designs from the early-Renaissance buildings of Flanders, Holland and Germany was the inspired idea of architects Ernest George and Harold Peto, who collaborated to create this slice of Kensington & Chelsea.
Of the two, Peto would later become more celebrated, but, when Harrington Gardens was built, George was the more experienced. The son and grandson of ironmongers, he had discovered an interest in architecture at an early age—‘I… plotted to scale the school house and grounds, and persuaded my parents I should like to become an architect,’ he recalled in in 1921. In 1861, he opened his own
