Joseph Salway

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Joseph Salway was a British artist and surveyor hired by the Kensington Turnpike Trust, a body created by Parliament in 1725 to look after several important roads west of London. In 1811 he produced fifteen large watercolour drawings showing the plan and the elevation of the Turnpike road from Hyde Park Corner to Counter’s Bridge, near what is now the Olympia exhibition area in West Kensington.

The bottom half of Salway’s drawings shows the road plan from above, with gutters, drains and grates, plus notes about drainage. It also records details like cobbled pavements, parish water pumps, hitching posts for horses, and individually numbered lampposts, all drawn with shading to look three-dimensional. The top half presents a street-level view looking north, with accurate depictions of houses, churches, shops and taverns, and notes on how some buildings were used (for example, a floor-cloth factory and the old Horse Barracks). Some pubs along Portland Road, including the Hand & Flower, are mentioned, with a few still existing today.

The original drawings are in the British Museum. They were republished in 1903 by the London Topographical Society under the title Plan of the road from Hyde Park Corner to Counter’s Bridge. The publication states it was made for the Kensington Turnpike Trustees by Joseph Salway in 1811 and was lithographed on thirty sheets from the original drawings by W. Griggs and Sons. The British Library also holds a copy and has made all the lithographs available online. The 15 drawings were reprinted as 30 plates (1 to 15a), each about 610 by 686 mm. If placed end-to-end, they would form a 60-foot-long panorama about 2.6 miles long, stretching from Hyde Park Corner through Knightsbridge and Kensington High Street to Counter’s Bridge, where Kensington and Chelsea ends and Hammersmith begins. A detailed description of the buildings and people along the road, by Colonel W. F. Prideaux, appeared in the London Topographical Record in 1903–04.