Eaton Square Residents Association
EATON SQUARE RESIDENTS ASSOCIATION
George Waite is a long-term resident of Eaton Square and is the Chairman of ESRA. George was a founding member of the Belgravia Society. He recognised the need to have a strong voice for the residents of Eaton Square to deal with the many issues arising with Grosvenor. ESRA was formed as a sub-group of the Belgravia Society and remains so today.
Eaton Square is a residential square in Belgravia. It is one of the garden squares built by the Grosvenor family when they developed the main part of Belgravia in the 19th century. It is named after Eaton Hall, Grosvenor’s country house in Cheshire. It is less grand than the central feature of Belgravia, Belgrave Square, but it is both larger and grander than Chester Square.
The first block of Eaton Square was laid out by Thomas Cubitt from 1827. The houses in Eaton Square are large and are predominantly three windows wide, joined in regular terraces, and of classical style with substantial porticoes. They have five main storeys, plus attics and basements with mews houses to the rear. The Square is one of London’s largest and is divided into six separate gardens by the upper end of King’s Road (north-east of Sloane Square), a main road, now busy with traffic that occupies its long axis and has small across streets.
Most of the houses are faced with stucco but some are faced with brick. The colour of the stucco is a light cream which is prescribed for all properties in Belgravia where stucco is used. Most of the houses are now divided into flats. Some of the larger houses which are undivided are used as embassies and a number of houses have been restored to single residential units. At the east end of the Square is St Peter’s Church. It is built in the classic style, which features six iconic portico pillars and a clock tower. It was designed by Henry Hakewell and built between 1824 and 1827, during the first development of Eaton Square.
The church has twice been destroyed by fire. First in 1837 when it was rebuilt from the original drawings, and again in October 1987 when an anti-Catholic arsonist, in the mistaken belief that the church was a Roman Catholic one, set fire to it. The church was engulfed and only the Georgian shell remained. The rebuilding work started in 1990 and was completed in 1991.