C O N T E X T 1 4 5 : J U LY 2 0 1 6 27 Albert Hall Mansions by Richard Norman Shaw, 1972 commercially, subsequent international exhibitions organised in 1862, 1869, 1871, 1873 and 1874 ran into increasing financial difficulty. By 1874, the commissioners were embarrassed to hold mortgage debt of £208,500 with an annual income of only £8,744. InMarch 1875, at the time of the completion of the first 10-storey stage of Queen Anne’s Mansions, Sir Henry Hunt, the commissioners’ surveyor, invited tenders for the lease of a valuable site fronting Kensington Road and Hyde Park to the north, and the new Albert Hall to the east. By December, a tender had been accepted from Thomas Hussey, builder, of Kensington High Street, for a 99-year building lease. InApril 1876 Hussey’s architects presented plans for a row of large houses on the site. The commissioners, sensitive to the need to maintain the high quality of development established by Shaw in the recently completed Lowther Lodge (1873) and 196 Queens Gate (1875), were unhappy with the architecture and rejected the designs. Hussey was persuaded to appoint Shaw to redesign Hussey’s elevations at the commissioners’ expense. Shaw’s reworked houses were never to see the light of day. In large part this was because of the initial success of Queen Anne’s Mansions. Henry Hunt had from the beginning been in favour of ‘a large pile of buildings to be used for Residential Chambers’. Hussey went back to his original architects Driver and Rew to design a mansion block of flats exceeding 100 feet in height. With a weakening in the market for Hankey’s flats due in large part to the public controversy over their height and appearance, the commissioners objected to Driver and Rew’s flats proposal on the Hankey system, purportedly on grounds of fire safety due to its height. They employed Shaw to collaborate with Driver and Rew, Shaw essentially elevating their proposals. The result was described by a clearly unconvinced Shaw in 1877 as a design he was ‘quite prepared to father’. The commissioners, equally unconvinced by the resulting design, decided to present a fait accompli to Hussey, appointing Shaw to design a row of houses from scratch. The proposition was rejected by Hussey, who bowed to the inevitable by appointing Shaw to take over the entire flats project as architect. Shaw promptly visited Paris with his assistant Ernest Newton to research the planning of continental flats.The
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