CHELSEA CHAPTERS
The heights and history of London’s most exclusive borough, celebrated in a new volume
Daniel Defoe called it a ‘town of palaces’; Samuel Pepys saw it as a place to ‘take some air’; Arthur Ransome described it as a ‘battlefield and bivouacking ground for art and literature’. Chelsea has always had a strong hold on the popular imagination, having variously been home to writers, artists, soldiers and horticulturalists over the centuries. A new book by the architectural historian Dan Cruickshank charts the district’s evolution from an ancient riverside village to an 18th-century ‘new town’, building up to its more recent incarnations as the birthplace of mod fashion and punk in the 1960s and 1970s, and the site of ambitious 21st-century regeneration projects. This is a fascinating look behind the elegant façades of one of the capital’s most affluent neighbourhoods. meg honigmann ‘Built in Chelsea’ by Dan Cruickshank (£30, Unicorn) is out now.