Cheyne Walk: George Eliot and Rossetti's Wombats
Why is it significant?
Walk slowly along this row of tall eighteenth-century houses, with their wrought-iron gates, tiny front gardens and windows facing the river. Count the blue plaques as you go... on Cheyne Walk you will run out of fingers.
Key Facts
| Place | Cheyne Walk: George Eliot and Rossetti's Wombats |
|---|---|
| Address | 16 Cheyne Walk, London SW3 5RA, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.48400, -0.16590 |
| Part of Walk | Pensioners, Poets and Punks: Chelsea's Riverside History from the Royal Hospital to the King's Road, London |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk slowly along this row of tall eighteenth-century houses, with their wrought-iron gates, tiny front gardens and windows facing the river. Count the blue plaques as you go... on Cheyne Walk you will run out of fingers.
These houses were built in the early eighteenth century, when the Thames still came up almost to their front steps. The Embankment you see now was only built in the 1870s. Before that, Chelsea was a riverside village, and its residents went into town by boat.
At number 4, look for the plaque to George Eliot, the author of Middlemarch. In 1880, aged sixty, she shocked society by marrying John Cross, a man twenty years younger, and in December they moved into this house full of plans. Within three weeks she caught a chill and died here, on 22 December 1880. She had lived in it for less time than it takes to unpack.
Number 16, a little further on, is wilder. From 1862 the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti lived here, grieving after the death of his wife Lizzie Siddal, and he filled the long back garden with a menagerie: armadillos, kangaroos, owls, a raccoon, peacocks, and his great love, wombats. He named one of them Top, after his friend William Morris's nickname, and it is said to have liked sleeping on the dinner table during parties. The poet Swinburne lodged with him, and the house was loud, untidy and brilliant.
Local legend says Rossetti's peacocks screamed so much that the landlords, the Cadogan family, added a clause to Cheyne Walk leases forbidding the keeping of peacocks. A century later the street had rock-and-roll neighbours instead, when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards both lived on Cheyne Walk at the end of the 1960s. Now cross towards the river and the extraordinary candy-coloured bridge just ahead.