The Story of 31 Milton Road

In the autumn of 1874, William Prince, an enterprising Middlesex builder, acquired several plots of land in the ancient parish of Acton, then a fashionable country retreat for well-heeled residents of London town.

Well served by horse-drawn trams, and conveniently close to recently opened Acton Station on Churchfield Road, Prince spotted an opportunity to build high quality homes in the newly laid out enclave of Poet’s Corner.

To prevent unscrupulous developers building substandard housing or industrial units in what was intended to be pleasant residential neighbourhood, his lease from the British Land Company stipulated that factories, workshops and industrial equipment of any kind were prohibited and that no dwelling costing less than a hundred and fifty pounds was permitted on Milton Road. Playing the piano between midnight and dawn, was also prohibited – a stipulation still in force to this day.

By the following summer, William Prince had constructed a three-storey building, consisting of two mirror-image dwellings with a shared spine wall and chimney flues that were to become numbers 31 and 33 Milton Road, Acton.

A retired grocer, Edward Clark, his family, maid, Mary, took up residence at number 31. The house stayed in the same family for the next five decades, when the last of the Clarks, being childless, left it to her servant, who according to neighbours, was still living there in the 1960s.

Re-merging of the flats back into a single home

In the 1970s, the house was split up into flats, with a garden flat (31A) on the ground floor, and a two bedroom maisonette (31B) on the first and second floor.
There were rumours that attic (now the master bedroom) was used as a sweat shop. The maisonette was bought by its present owner, Judi, a chef and food writer, in 1987, and when the garden flat unexpectedly came up for sale some years later, she acquired that too as a rental property.

Returning to London after living New York, Judi and her husband decided to convert the 2 flats back into a single home. The warren of narrow corridors and small rooms that made up the ground floor flat was gutted, and internal walls removed to create a large open plan kitchen-living-dining space.

Renovation

To merge the structure back into a single home, partitions between the 2 flats were removed, and the original Victorian hallway and staircase renovated, using the sister-property next door, which had retained its original layout, as a guide. The ramshackle ground floor flat with 6 small rooms connected by narrow, winding corridors was opened up to become an airy, open-plan space, where Judi, a chef, teacher and food writer, now gives bespoke cookery classes.

The 1970s extension that housed the ground floor kitchen was demolished and replaced with a sliding glass wall that now opens on to a newly enlarged Mediterranean-inspired terrace and garden.

In 2016 a glass-roofed side infill extension was added to house an open plan kitchen, dining and living space. Wherever possible, the original features of the house – wooden beams, rafters, and brickwork exposed during the renovation, were retained and feature in the new design. The project was completed in spring 2018.

A New Addition

In 2025 the existing attic bedroom and small bathroom were enlarged with a roof-top extension to create a spacious master bedroom with glass rooflights and a West-facing ensuite to create a sense of space and calm. Natural materials and preowned items were repurposed and recycled where possible to create a sense of calm and wellbeing. The void between the floor of the attic and ceiling of the one below is used for storage and accessed by a 'lift" on the second floor and two hatches on the top floor.