Atdtda22: [42.1i] A fashionable inner suburb, 606

[Paul Nightingale]

[606.35-36] "The subject Replevin runs a shop in Kensington, dealing,
according to his file, in 'Trans-Oxanian and Graeco-Buddhist antiquities',
whatever those may be when they're at home ..."

Kensington was a "fashionable inner suburb", according to Ball & Sunderland
(139). 

The nineteenth century was the time when personal improvement through
cultivated leisure was promoted as a worthwhile pastime. This trend led to
the construction, in central, north and west London, of many new museums,
art galleries and concert halls. Spatial concentration can again be seen as
museums and galleries were centred on the West End and the new Kensington
site opened up after the 1851 Great Exhibition. [...] 

The scale of public cultural building was far greater than it was in the
twentieth century, and it helped to encourage the drift of fashion and
social activity westwards. Funding for these enterprises was a mixture of
public and private donations and profit-seeking investment. For example,
royal initiative after the 1851 Exhibition, aided by Parliamentary funding,
led to eighty acres of land being purchased south of Hyde Park for museums,
concert halls, colleges and premises for learned societies--from which came
the Albert Hall and the South Kensington museum quarter. 

From: Michael Ball & David Sunderland, An Economic History of London,
1800-1914, Routledge, 2001, 162.