This month's walk takes you through Chelsea's shops and markets before exploring backstreets lined with artists' studios, taking in part of Chelsea's historic river front and the buildings and grounds of the Royal Hospital, before coming back to the Kings Road and Sloane Square.

Highlights

Kings Road
Michelin Building
Chelsea Farmers' Market
Artists' studios at Glebe Place
Cheyne Walk
Chelsea Physic Garden (limited winter opening times)
Royal Hospital Chelsea

The best time to do this short but fascinating walk is in late afternoon/early evening when the Christmas decorations in the shop windows along the Kings Road, Draycott Avenue and Fulham Road look their best and you can admire the thousands of small Christmas lights in the branches of the bare trees in Sloane Square.


Type of walk: circular

Time taken: 1.5 hours approx (excluding window shopping, actual shopping, sitting down at a pavement café for a hot chocolate and exploring the buildings and grounds of the Royal Hospital)

Distance: three miles approx


Start and finish: Sloane Square tube station (circle and district lines).

Come out of the station and cross at the pedestrian crossing straight ahead to reach Sloane Square. The square is named after the seventeenth century physician and collector Hans Sloane, who also owned the land on which the Chelsea Physic Gardens now stands. But to many Londoners, "Sloane" is a nickname for affluent home counties boys and girls fresh out of public school living in Chelsea flats bought for them by Mummie and Daddy.

Sloane Square itself is now little more than a traffic roundabout but the Christmas lights in the trees make the square look positively festive, especially at dusk. Continue straight ahead with Sloane Square on your right, towards the distinctive glass sweep of Peter Jones department store, where generations of affluent families have their wedding lists, and shop for well-made, dependable kitchen equipment and tasteful furniture at reasonable prices. PJs, recently refurbished at a cost of £107 million, is worth a diversion to stock up on small, portable Christmas presents, and the aptly named Top Floor restaurant on the sixth floor has great views across London.

The walk continues straight on past Peter Jones on your right (look right to admire the store's glass snow Christmas window decorations) down the Kings Road, with its smart clothes shops and customers laden with shopping bags drinking coffee at outside tables. The Kings Road may have lost some of its 1960s bohemian edge but it is still a good place to window-shop and people-watch.

A short way down Kings Road, turn right down Blacklands Terrace, lined with three storey brick and stucco flat fronted Victorian terraces typical of Chelsea's architecture. Chelsea used to be a working class area close to the industrial riverside. Now it is one of the most expensive parts of London, its terraces and mansion flats highly sought after by wealthy buyers from around the world.

Continue to the junction and turn left up Draycott Place, past red brick mansion blocks with florid Dutch gables. Turn right into Draycott Avenue and follow the road up to the junction with Fulham Road, to reach the extraordinary Michelin Building. Now home to the Bibendum Oyster Bar and the Conran Shop, the building was the first British headquarters of the French Michelin Tyre Company. It was threatened with partial demolition in the 1960s but thankfully rescued and preserved in its entirety. The walls are decorated with painted tiles depicting idyllic scenes of early motorists driving down empty French country roads alongside the familiar figure of the Michelin tyre man (aka Bibendum, hence the name of the restaurant).

The Bibendum coffee bar in the tiled foyer of the building is good for quick refreshments. If you fancy oysters and a glass of white wine, try the Bibendum restaurant inside the building.

Turn left into Fulham Road past expensive boutiques and galleries on your left and the sweep of white stucco terraces in Pelham Crescent on your right, then turn left at the traffic lights into Sydney Street. Half way down on your right, just past the Royal Brompton Hospital, is The Chelsea Gardener, its interior glistening with Christmas decorations, wreaths, fake snow and everything your home needs to exude seasonal cheer. The shop also delivers Christmas trees in various sizes. It is part of the Chelsea Farmers' Market, which also has an organic supermarket, secondhand bookshop and a choice of pizza and grill restaurants.

At the junction with the Kings Road, turn right, then take the second left into Glebe Place, an oasis of calm after the busy Kings Road. The street, lined with artists' studios with large light windows, was part of a burgeoning artists' colony in late Victorian Chelsea, and the studios here were built commercially to let to artists. Numbers 68-69 still have the words Turner Studios carved into the gable and blue plaques on the walls of neighbouring properties record that artist Sir Alfred Munnings and sculptor William McMillan lived and worked here at different times during the early and mid- twentieth century.

Follow the road round to the right past number 50, with carved statues on the roof, tall French style windows and artist's studio and wrought iron balconies, and continue along Glebe Place as it bends left. Opposite St Thomas More catholic church turn right into narrow Upper Cheyne Row, lined with whitewashed, flat-fronted cottages, then left into Lawrence Street leading down to the Thames. Turn left into Cheyne Walk.

Chelsea's riverside location (and its comparatively reasonable prices) was what tempted many artists to the area in the nineteenth century and there was a sizeable artists' colony around Cheyne Walk. Now these handsome Georgian houses change hands for millions of pounds, despite the heavy traffic on the Embankment, a couple of hundred yards away.

Cross Oakley Street at the pedestrian crossing. If you are doing this walk as dusk falls, look right to see the graceful pillars of the Albert Bridge lit up, marking the crossing to Battersea. Continue along Cheyne Walk, where a Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea plaque marks the site of Henry VIII's former manor house until 1759. Blue plaques at number 16 record that it was once home to the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the poet Algernon Swinburne.

At the junction of Cheyne Walk, Flood Street and Royal Hospital Road, turn left into Royal Hospital Road away from the river. On your right as you walk up, behind high brick walls, is the Chelsea Physic Garden, a botanist's delight of rare herbs and plants. The Garden is open specially on the first two weekends of December. The entrance is just off Royal Hospital Road in Swan Walk.

The walk continues straight on up Royal Hospital Road, which opens out suddenly on the right to reveal the elegant seventeenth buildings of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, designed by Christopher Wren and completed in 1692. The hospital is home to 350 former servicemen, highly visible on ceremonial occasions because of their red coats. The buildings, including the chapel, Great Hall and museum, are open to visitors and you can also walk around the grounds which stretch back down to the Thames.

Just past the playing fields opposite the Royal Hospital, turn left into Franklin Row. Cross St Leonard's Terrace into Hamilton Terrace and turn right into the Kings Road.

Continue straight on to reach Sloane Square tube and the end of the walk. Alternatively, turn right off the Kings Road where it opens out into a new square. This is Duke of York Square, a development of new shops and restaurants around a pedestrianism piazza which was built in neo-Georgian style on the former Duke of York's military headquarters, opening up this 4.5 hectare of land on the King's Road to the public for the first time for 200 years. Cafes and restaurants have set out tables in the square, where you can finish your walk with a drink or meal and watch the Christmas lights come on in the shop windows.
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