's 1790 map Where the old turnpike highway (
Fulham Road) meets today's Thurloe Place and becomes
Brompton Road is sometimes called
Brompton Cross. The old village of Brompton carried on straddling the secondary Brompton Lane, later
Old Brompton Road, for the whole of its length. In modern terms
Old Brompton centred on today's
South Kensington tube station,
Gloucester Road tube station and their contiguous streets, and continued all the way to
West Brompton station, between
Earl's Court and
Thames-side
Chelsea. The historian F.H.W. Sheppard has summarised it thus:"there was always much traffic on the old turnpike road, which linked London not only with Little Chelsea and Fulham but also (via Putney Bridge) with parts of Surrey as well, and which from 1726 to 1826 was maintained by the Kensington Turnpike Trustees. Anciently, the eastern end of this highway was known indiscriminately as the road to Fulham or the road to Brompton. The name 'Brompton', now used loosely, then applied most precisely to the settlement which lay westwards of what is now South Kensington Station, just off the turnpike road along the lane to Earl's Court. This lane, generally called Brompton Lane or Bell and Horns Lane, diverged from the main road at the Bell and Horns, an inn sited opposite the [Brompton Oratory], where Empire House now stands. After the frontages of Brompton Road nearer London had been built up, the original nucleus of Brompton became known as Old Brompton and Brompton Lane as Old Brompton Road—which name survives today except in the short stretch east of South Kensington Station, where its line is represented by Thurloe Place. Before 1863 therefore, 'Brompton Road' was in general an unofficial term, usually to be construed as meaning the part of the Fulham turnpike road connecting Knightsbridge with Brompton Lane and thus with Old Brompton."
Extent , London SW7, with
stucco terraces typical of today's "Brompton" Brompton's northern neighbours were the hamlets of
Kensington Gore, dated but not dead in use, and
Knight's bridge, a crossing over the
culverted
river Westbourne. As to its old eastern half its administration remains in the
City of Westminster, again due to the tube network it is commonly marked on maps as part of "Knightsbridge" district. Brompton (or very rarely
New Brompton) had a jagged north-eastern limit owing to the medieval permanent assignation of
Kensington Gore to
Westminster. According to the
Church of England this has been simplified so that a three-church parish ''Holy Trinity Brompton –
St Paul's, Onslow Square and
St Augustine's, Queen's Gate'' takes up a
SW to WSW radial sector focused on what was for many centuries a geographical point, a bridge, "
Knights Bridge (Knightsbridge)", from which Brompton was always narrowly omitted. That point later became a
Crossroads for arterial roads, known as "
Scotch Corner". Boundaries can be traced in the street network with a few small gaps, clockwise from the north: • Imperial College Road, Ennismore Street, Montpellier Mews (southern straight), Knightsbridge (street),
Basil Street,
Walton Street,
Fulham Road, Drayton Gardens, and Ashburn, Grenville, Launceston, Kynance and Elvaston Places. The rest of "South Kensington" and Kensington proper, including the first manor, centred on what became a royal palace (
Kensington Palace), instead of simply a manor house, and lay to the north.
Chelsea was to the south. Its fragmented existence is commemorated chiefly through four of the places listed below. ==History==