Main MenuOld Church Street (originally Church Lane then Church Street), home of Chelsea Old Church is the oldest street in Chelsea and the street and its environs have a story to tell.
Where We Are
Where the Bishop of London entertained Elizabeth I, Pink Floyd recorded Arnold Layne, and visitors to Chelsea Old Church believed they saw the ghost of Thomas More.
The Anglo-Saxon settlement by the church and the river remained the heart of the only known area of settlement in Chelsea until the 17th century. Most of the parish was covered by two large open arable fields, Eastfield and Westfield, with Church Lane marking the division between them
Quoting Reginald Blunt in 1928 who said the King’s Road divides Church Street very decidedly into Upper and Lower the former is a quiet and pleasant thoroughfare, the Lower after you have passed the Rectory has all the slatternliness of a region over which hangs the doom of demolition and contains its earliest parish church, its Petyt School, its Rectory and several 17th and 18th century houses of which one until recently bore a cast iron sign of a cock devouring a snake with the date 1652. Opposite the old brown brick wall of the Rectory you can peer into a big stable, successor to an ancient coachyard where the horses go upstairs to bed.