Some cool real estate london images:
The Shard
Image by estatesgazette
View of the completed Shard at London Bridge
UK, London, Berkeley Square
Image by hdes.copeland
London, Berkeley Square, June 2004.
This is a late 18th century example of a highly successful mixed-use urban neighborhood located west of central London. Elegant town homes face one of the city's famous squares where both permanent and part-time residents lived. The landed gentry came to London to conduct business and engage in politics. Highly successful merchants lived among their best seasonal customers. High end shops and professional offices were located on the street level of some town houses while others serve as clubs or meeting spaces for influential cultural and political groups supported by the city's elite.
The evolution of this space is as interesting as its current use. It seems that the Berkeley family were land holders and politically active in the early 17th century. They played a role in both camps during the political upheavals surrounding the English Civil War, the execution of King Charles I and the Commonwealth government of Oliver Cromwell. Fortunately for the Berkeley family, they played both ends delicately. With the death of Cromwell, the demise of the Commonwealth and the Restoration of King Charles II, the Berkeley's were seen as what might be called the friends of Charles, the heir appearent. The Berkeley family was rewarded accordingly. Since Charles II only had a throne and his head intact, and no money, land was the most common reward for his supporters. Already well endowed with real estate, the Berkeley's were not unhappy to receive more land.
This square and the surrounding neighborhood was the site of the Berkeley family's suburban estate which in the late 1600's was still just outside the western limits of London. Besides, the Berkeley's were busy with other interests, including one serving as Colonial Governor of Virginia. They held profitable sugar plantations in the Caribbean and were partial owners of the speculative colony of New Jersey. Two Berkeley brothers were among the eight original Lord Proprietors of the new colony of Carolina which began in 1670.
They were just as interested in things profitable and political inside London. Along with others associated with the Carolina venture, the Berkeley's were contemporaries of Lord Ashley Cooper, his secretary John Locke and others who would be deeply involved with the political, economic and literary life of London just as it was becoming the center of a global empire. Eventually, the Berkeley's turned their attentions to investments closer to home. They left their names on places in Virginia and the Carolinas, but their most profitable investments eventually were those in and around London.
By the 1770's the Berkeley family had moved beyond their American colonial interests and so had London. The Berkeley's suburban estate was by then surrounded by an ever expanding, crowded and, at least for some, very prosperous London. That generation of Berkeley's decided to become real estate speculators much closer to home. In fact they tore down their family home, leveled the estate and redeveloped it as an upscale London neighborhood surrounding the square that would continue to bear the family name.
A Charleston merchant, Henry Laurens, in 1780, was technically still a prisoner of the Tower of London. Laurens, the former President of the Continental Congress, was a high profile leader in the American Revolution. He had been captured at sea by a British warship while on his way to negotiate an alliance with the Dutch against the British and could very well have been executed for treason.
London merchants ruled with as much power as the throne, at least when it came to the power of the purse. Laurens was respected, very wealthy and a skillful merchant in his own right. Among his many business friends in London he was considered to be an equal among the best of them even though he was an American. He was too important to execute as time would prove. He was eventually exchanged as a prisoner of war for Lord Cornwallis. This came just in time to be named to be one of three Americans authorized to negotiate the final peace with Great Britain ending the hostilities between England and its former colonies. Until then, and for several years during his imprisonment, Laurens had been given the freedom of the city provided he reported back to his jailers at the Tower at the end of the day.
He must have observed the construction of Berkeley Square which by then was in earnest. He must have also found the real estate enterprises of the most recent generation of Berkeley's to be interesting. By then South Carolina had become a Royal Colony and the Lord Proprietors of which the Berkeley’s were two of the wiser ones, had long ago sold their interests in what began as a private venture. Still the Berkeley’s were a familiar name to most of South Carolina’s leadership one hundred years later, if only for the Berkeley’s high profile activities of the day.
Henry Laurens was very likely intimately familiar with their involvement in London businesses with which he had dealings as he traded in international commodities, including rice and indigo dyes for the British textile industry. Laurens must have studied London’s expansion even as it was at war with its colonies in America. It's not surprising that Laurens would later try his hand at real estate speculation when he returned to Charleston.
The history of Hampstead Square, now part of Charleston's Eastside, shows that Laurens must have imagined his development in light of what he had seen in London a decade earlier. He was after all a businessman first. He harbored no real animosity toward those who kept him prisoner while giving him the run of the city. Though he had traveled to London in his youth as part of his education and many times as a young businessman before the start of the Revolution, he must have used this forced and extended stay as an opportunity to see and learn from London’s civic experiments. This was just as the industrial revolution was about to begin in England.
Of course, timing is everything in real estate markets and Laurens missed it when Hampstead was initially proposed in the early 1790’s. It could be debated that he was either fifteen years too late or fifteen years too early. Eventually his version of Berkeley Square in Charleston was built out, but Hampstead Square in Charleston today has only a fleeting resemblance to its famous cousin in London. Unfortunately Laurens was long dead before Hampstead Square turned a profit for its subsequent owners.
Another member of this family, George Berkeley, though a distant relation, was a leading light in English and Irish intellectual circles in the first half of the 18th century. As a highly regarded philosopher he would be considered an equal to Hume and Swift. His education was encouraged by Locke and Shaftsbury, not coincidently the same personalities that were involved in the founding of Carolina. This Berkeley would leave his name on educational institutions, from the famous library at his alma mater, Trinity College in Dublin, to the University of California at Berkeley.
Not that we intended to insult our Berkeley benefactors, in politics and ideas, but we now pay dubious respects to them by grossly mispronouncing their name in America. It's BARK-lay in London, but it's BURK-lee in Charleston.
