Discover Pimlico SW1V, Art, Architecture and the Thames
Pimlico SW1V was developed in the 1830s and 1840s by Thomas Cubitt, the same builder responsible for Belgravia, but on a deliberately different scale. Where Belgravia was designed for the very wealthiest residents with grand garden squares and the widest of streets, Pimlico was built as a more modest and densely planned neighbourhood, with a tighter grid of stucco-fronted terraces running down toward the Thames embankment at Millbank.
Tate Britain occupies the Millbank site on the southern edge of the postcode, housing the world's largest single collection of British art from 1500 to the present day. The building opened in 1897 as the National Gallery of British Art and has remained on the same riverside site ever since, with the collection growing to include Turner, Hogarth, Constable, Blake, Hirst, and the full breadth of British artistic production across five centuries.
Dolphin Square, completed in 1937, is one of London's largest private residential estates, a self-contained Art Deco development of around 1,200 apartments arranged around landscaped gardens on the Thames embankment. The estate was at various points home to politicians, military figures, and other public figures, and its sheer scale makes it one of the most distinctive addresses in SW1V. Churchill Gardens, to the north of the postcode, is an equally significant architectural landmark from the opposite end of the twentieth century, a prize-winning post-war housing estate designed by Powell and Moya in the late 1940s that remains a nationally listed example of modernist social housing design.
St George's Square runs from the heart of SW1V down to the embankment, a long Victorian garden square with a central planted strip and a consistent terrace of stucco houses that gives the area a formal, unhurried character despite its proximity to the bustle of Victoria just to the north.
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