The world's first artificial ice rink, the Glaciarium, opened just off King's Road in 1876, and later that year it relocated to a building on the street.

[citation needed] During the 1960s the street became a symbol of mod culture, evoking "an endless frieze of mini-skirted, booted, fair-haired angular angels", one magazine later wrote.

King's Road was home in that decade to the Chelsea Drugstore (originally a chemist with a stylised chrome-and-neon soda fountain upstairs, later a public house), and in the 1970s to Malcolm McLaren's boutique Let It Rock, which was renamed SEX in 1974, and then Seditionaries in 1977.

484 King's Road was the headquarters of Swan Song Records, owned by Led Zeppelin.

In 1984, Keith Wainwright, a pioneer responsible for starting one of the first men's hairdressers catering for the longer men's styles of the time, with such clients including Roy Wood, Cat Stevens and The Walker Brothers, opened the salon "Smile", at 434 King's Road.

In Ian Fleming's novels, James Bond lives in an unspecified fashionable square just off King's Road.

Southern also run direct rail services to Milton Keynes Central and East Croydon from this station.

Due to this, the route of Crossrail 2 is proposed to have an underground station in this area, called King's Road Chelsea.

Further east, the same services are also provided at Cadogan Pier, only a few blocks south of King's Road near the Albert Bridge.