Brief history of the land

Rillington Place and Ruston Mews (originally called Crayford Mews) were developed in the late 1860s, when speculative building in the area of North Kensington was ongoing, on the farm land of “the Manor or Lordship of Notting Barns.”  The freeholder of the land was Colonel Matthew Chitty Downes St Quintin (b: 1800 d: 1876) whose family seat was Scampston Hall near Malton in North Yorkshire. The village of Rillington is less than a mile away whilst that of Ruston Parva is perhaps twenty miles to the south east. Matthew St Quintin suffered greatly from mental illness and his wife arranged for the management of his estates to be transferred to relatives in the late 1850s. Development proceeded solely on the basis of  the grant of long leases to speculative developers in return for an annual ground rent.

The houses were originally intended for single-household occupation by comparatively well-to-do families and there is some evidence that this may have been the case early on (see extract from 1890 register below). However, surviving notes from a survey entitled: Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People in London carried out by Charles Booth between 1886 - 1903 describes the occupants of Rillington Place as “respectable working class...some poor.” Further, the turbulent financial circumstances and changing social conditions of the time led to an increasing incidence of multiple occupation by poorer people using rooms, or collections thereof, in a way that was never intended when the houses were designed. As a consequence, it would be commonplace to find a large number of occupants having to share the one outside lavatory and to which access could only be gained via the ground floor rooms. Indeed, this pattern of occupation continued until the houses’ eventual demolition as virtual slums in 1970. The electoral register from 1952, during which time Mr & Mrs Christie were both still in occupation (and bearing in mind only adults aged twenty-one years and above would be listed anyway), gives some indication of the overcrowding and lack of privacy that tenants were obliged to endure.

Above - an extract from a register of residents compiled in the year 1890 - and something of the order of  twenty years after Rillington Place was constructed.

Timothy Evans’s reburial

Following her son’s royal pardon, Timothy Evans’s mother was granted permission to have her son’s mortal remains disinterred from their original place of burial within the precincts of Pentonville Prison and re-interred in consecrated ground.

As a committed Roman Catholic, Evans's mother, Mrs Thomasina Probert, originally intended to re-inter her son's remains at the Greenford Park Cemetery in the London Borough of Ealing. Arrangements had been made and a plot duly acquired and prepared. However, news of this was leaked and, fearing a “media circus” the solicitors acting for Mrs Probert had to make a last-minute alteration to the plans whereby the burial actually took place in St Patrick’s Catholic Cemetery, Leytonstone - the other side of London. A decoy vehicle duly left Pentonville Prison at the appointed time and made its way to Greenford with the press following; shortly afterwards the vehicles containing the true burial party left for Leytonstone unobserved. Even Mrs Probert herself only became aware of the changed arrangements when she realised that their direction of travel was away from Greenford. A fuller account may be read in Hansard by following the link below. Mr William Molloy was the MP for Ealing, North at that time (1965).

http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1965/nov/25/timothy-evans-reinterment

The renaming of Rillington Place

The extract below from the minutes of the meeting of councillors for the Royal Borough of Kensington on 19 May 1953 records the receipt of a petition by eighty-three residents of Rillington Place to have the street name changed. Organised by Mrs Sarah McFadden at no. 3 and presented initially to the local MP Mr George Rogers, this was, of course, motivated by the notoriety associated with the address and the numbers of visitors coming to what was already a narrow and congested cul-de-sac. Given that Rillington Place contained just twenty small, terraced houses, the number of people signing the petition was substantial and gives something of an insight into the degree of overcrowding that was occurring even then.

The decision was apparently taken to defer consideration of the request on the grounds that a name change was unlikely to have much effect, particularly upon the question of unwanted visitors, (and which view was subsequently borne out when a name change did have little impact upon the problem). In fact, in order to promote consistency and continuity, it was the London County Council rather than the individual boroughs which had competence for the naming and signage of streets throughout London. The extract from the council minutes in June 1954 records this.