Ravenscourt Park, Hammersmith & Fulham
A public park and its neighbouring residential locality, situated at the western end of Hammersmith
Ravenscourt Park
From at least the 14th century this was the manor of Pallingswick or Paddenswick. In 1746 Secretary to the Admiralty Thomas Corbett bought the estate and rebuilt the manor house, naming it Ravenscourt after the bird on his family’s coat of arms. Parts of the 80-acre estate were leased to tenant farmers after Corbett’s death.
George Scott, who lived at Ravenscourt from 1812 to 1859, progressively sold off chunks of his land for housebuilding and insisted on high standards of architecture and construction. He also improved the parkland and added flower gardens. Some of the new houses were soon demolished during the building of the railway that cut across the southern end of the estate. The station opened in 1877, and was called Shaftesbury Road for the first eleven years of its existence.
In 1887 Scott’s heirs sold Ravenscourt and 32 acres of grounds to the Metropolitan Board of Works, which converted the gardens into a park. ‘To my mind this indeed is the most beautiful park in London’, wrote W H Hudson in Birds in London in 1898. Queen Charlotte’s Hospital opened in a large Victorian house on the west side of the park in 1929. Two years later the Royal Masonic (now Ravenscourt Park) Hospital replaced some neighbouring houses. Ravenscourt served as a public library in its later years but was destroyed in an air raid in 1941.
Ravenscourt Park was designated a conservation area in 1974 and plans to demolish old houses in Paddenswick Road were abandoned. Queens Charlotte’s Hospital has relocated next to Hammersmith Hospital at Wormwood Scrubs and its former site has been redeveloped with housing, a community centre, doctors’ surgery and shops.
Half of Ravenscourt Park’s residents are single and a similar number are university-educated. Among the area’s many ethnic minorities the Polish community is the most visible, with a cultural centre on King Street and specialist shops nearby.
