Lindsey House, Whistler and Battersea Bridge
Why is it significant?
Here the terrace gives way to a long, low mansion with a tiled roof, set back behind its railings and facing the river. Just beyond it, the iron arches of Battersea Bridge stride across to the south bank. This is Lindsey House, the only seventeenth-century nobleman's house left in Chelsea.
Key Facts
| Place | Lindsey House, Whistler and Battersea Bridge |
|---|---|
| Address | 100 Cheyne Walk, London SW10 0DQ, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.48160, -0.17400 |
| Part of Walk | Pensioners, Poets and Punks: Chelsea's Riverside History from the Royal Hospital to the King's Road, London |
| Generated | Generated |
Here the terrace gives way to a long, low mansion with a tiled roof, set back behind its railings and facing the river. Just beyond it, the iron arches of Battersea Bridge stride across to the south bank. This is Lindsey House, the only seventeenth-century nobleman's house left in Chelsea.
It was built in 1674 for the Earl of Lindsey, on land that had once been part of Thomas More's estate. In 1750 it was bought by Count Zinzendorf, the leader of the Moravian Church, a Protestant brotherhood from central Europe, who made it the headquarters of his mission in England. Later the house was divided into several homes, and some remarkable people moved in.
In the early nineteenth century, one of them was home to the engineer Marc Isambard Brunel and his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who as a boy would have watched the boats on this very river he later dreamed of tunnelling under. And from 1866 the American painter James McNeill Whistler lived at number 96, looking out at the old wooden Battersea Bridge.
Whistler painted that bridge again and again at night, in misty blues and golds, the lights of fireworks drifting above it. He called the pictures nocturnes, as if they were pieces of music. When the critic John Ruskin accused him of flinging a pot of paint in the public's face, Whistler sued for libel in 1878. He won... and was awarded damages of one farthing, the smallest coin in the realm. The legal costs ruined him, and he was soon bankrupt.
The rickety wooden bridge he loved, built in 1771, was replaced in 1890 by the iron one you see now, designed by Joseph Bazalgette. Today Whistler's nocturnes hang in great galleries, and they paved the way for modern painting. Now carry on along Cheyne Walk, past the houseboats, to a small house where the greatest painter of light in England spent his secret last years.