At Home: The Jewish History of Kensington Palace Gardens

The idyllic west London avenue of Kensington Palace Gardens has long been the most exclusive residential street in the UK, with property prices in the tens of millions. Yet the road also harbours an untold history as a favoured destination of Jewish families migrating across the capital during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in search of a peaceful, healthy environment in which to live. John Hilary introduces the Jewish entrepreneurs, politicians, intellectuals and aesthetes who turned Kensington Palace Gardens into an elite community, and examines the motivations and meanings behind their choice of home.

John Hilary is an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham, and the author of From Refugees to Royalty: The Remarkable Story of the Messel Family of Nymans. He is an affiliate of the Jewish Country Houses project currently run out of Oxford University, and his most recent research is focused on the cultural presence of German-Jewish migrants in Edwardian Britain.