John Samuel Phene
| John Samuel Phene LLD, FSA, FGS, FRGS FRSL | |||||||||
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| Died | 1912 | ||||||||
| Residence |
5 Carlton Terrace, Oakley St, SW 32 Oakley Street, SW [1888] | ||||||||
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Contents
Notes
Office Notes
House Notes
proposed 1871.10.20
Notes From Elsewhere
Dr. John Samuel Phene, FRIBA. One of the individuals who have had a lasting effect on the look of Oakley Street was Dr Phene, a scholar and antiquarian who lived in Chelsea for over 50 years. He developed a large tract of land that is now Oakley Street, Margaretta Terrace and Phene Street, and is credited with givng his houses a charming classicism that endures into 21st Century.
A familiar figure around the neigbourhood, living at 32 Oakley Street, small, dapper, with a Vandyck beard, Dr Phene was known as a forceful crusader for a new theory: that trees in towns help to purify the air and prevent epidemics. To this end he planted trees along both sides of Oakley Street in 1851 (which sadly no longer exist); and his example was said to have inspired the Prince Consort to do the same outside the new South Kensington Museum.
According to Thea Holme's book Chelsea, 1972, Dr Phene came from an old French family, whose Chateau de Savenay had stood on the Loire. At the corner ofOakley Street and Upper Cheyne Row, Dr Phene designed a kind of replica. By 1906 a local newspaper observed that after five years of construction, it would be abuilding like none other in Europe.
A photograph of the "Chateau" hangs in the Phene Arms. Thea Holme describes it:
" The front was literally plastered with writhing figures.. gods and goddesses and busts of the Royal Family"; " The house was painted red, the pillars and balustrades yellow, picked out with gold."
Dr Phene died in 1912. The strange house had gone by the early 1920s, though some of the carved stones are probably those built into the boundary wall of the Chelsea Open Air Nursery School, which lies behind thesite.
Margaretta Terrace, built in 1850, was named by Dr Phene after his first wife.
Dr Phene was a minor celebrity in his own time. He is still famous in a small way. A local eccentric who collected artworks from all over the world. A poor man’s Sir John Soane if you want to be cruel
The house is as famous as the man. Stories abound about Dr Phene and his house. His wife or his fiancé died and the wedding breakfast, already laid out was preserved untouched in the house just like Miss Havisham’s. I’m glad to say this is not true. A woman to whom he was engaged died of a rheumatic fever but that was many years before he built the house. He later married his cousin Margaretta. Some say the marriage soon failed others that it lasted for some time before Margaretta left and went to live in Paris. He did name a street after her though – Margaretta Terrace.
Another story told about Dr Phene is that Queen Victoria came to see the new houses he was building off Oakley Street and was pleased enough with them to say he could name the new street after her, but he declined as he had already promised the name to his wife. If this is true it sounds quite a daring thing to do. He may have made up for the slight later by writing a long narrative poem: “Victoria Queen of Albion – an idyll of the world’s advance in her life and reign” published in 1897. (I have a copy of the book here with me but I’m going to spare you any quotations from this work. It doesn’t make much sense to me even with the explanatory footnotes and illustrations.)
It’s also true that Dr Phene never actually lived in the house but he and his friends seem to have spent time in it, long enough to have created among other features a mortuary for cats within its walls. Or would that be another apocryphal story? The house is described as being in the style of a French chateau or an Italian palazzo depending on the source and either way as a celebration of Dr Phene’s rich and varied ancestry. He is said to have avoided completing the building because of a dispute over the rates with the Chelsea Vestry, which is a dull enough explanation to be plausible, but perhaps he simply never got around to finishing it. He had another house nearby in Oakley Street which wasn’t exactly conventional in appearance either.
For the record then, Dr John Samuel Phene: a traveller, a collector, a scholar, a poet, a recluse (who nevertheless seems to have had many friends), a property developer. An innovator in architecture and planning, he was the first person to think of planting trees in streets but also perhaps a lover of decay. The famous house was on the corner of Oakley Street and Upper Cheyne Row. It was built in the grounds of the literally crumbling eighteenth century mansion Cheyne House. The garden was overgrown and unkempt except where Dr Phene had carved out a section for the display of his collection of sculptures.