THE BAYSWATER REVIVAL

(pictured: PLP's 'Park Modern' overlooking Hyde Park)

Bayswater’ was ‘Bayard’s Watering Place’, for horses, where the Oxford Road from London, along the north side of Hyde Park, bridged the Westbourne Brook.

It has been, at times, seedy, shabby, and in places, slummy.

It's isolated, on the ‘wrong side of the park’*, and outclassed by its neighbours, posh Tyburnia and trendy Notting Hill.

Today's Bayswater is the outcome of rapid, disorganised development by builder-speculators, without a master plan: a ‘furious crescendo’, ‘borrowing Nash’s stucco uniform’** of residential terraces in the years leading up to WW1. Summerson says: ‘after 1850 it is rare to find any architect of good reputation designing estates’.

In 1868 a steamy, smoky railway was driven through it, and after WW2 multiple streets of damaged houses on the north side were demolished to build the Tecton’s Hallfield Estate, containing 656 flats for 2,362 people.

Its biggest thing was Whiteley’s Department Store, in Queensway, once equal to Selfridges or Harrods, closed in 1981, replaced by a mall in 1989, and finally by the ‘Six Senses Hotel’ last year. That was the end of its role as a shopping destination.

Now Bayswater is ‘undergoing an exhilarating transformation’, ‘evolving into a vibrant new destination for London', ‘delivering highly innovative, world-class architectural projects that blend state-of-the-art engineering with historic conservation.’***

So we’re going to meet at Paddington Square, possibly London's best example of sheer unadulterated modernism, soaring above the Bakerloo Line Station at Paddington, then use the boulevards of Tyburnia, the dual-carriageways of their day, to reach Gloucester Terrace: 800m of straight, level, complete, continuous terraces, forming the boundary of Bayswater.

As we turn in to Craven Road, the first thing you’ll notice is the sudden, precipitous fall in level, in the mews entrances on either side. In fact, we are walking directly above the subterranean River Westbourne, AND the tunnels of the 1868 Metropolitan Railway extension from Paddington, undertaken at the behest of Parliament, to a new station called ‘Bayswater’, 600m to the west.

But Bayswater’s still full of unique features, like Kenneth Frampton’s ‘Corringham’, the UK’s only private ‘scissors-plan’ block of flats, where all the rooms are connected by short staircases: why didn’t that idea catch on?

We’ll see the ‘Sham Fronts’, hiding that railway, and, for the first 40 years, its smoke and steam, in Leinster Gardens: matching exactly the 6-storey terraces on either side (except the street doors have no letterboxes).

The front looks spooky, the back is positively scary.

And a ‘Whispering Gallery’, better than the one in St Paul’s, in the Foster + Partners-designed ‘Six Senses Hotel’, in the 1911 building by Edwardian Baroque specialists Belcher & Joass, that was once Whiteley’s Department Store in Queensway.

Between Queensway and our luncheon venue you’ll see:

• Claimed as London’s 1st ‘Post-Modern’ building, CZWG’s 10 Salem Road: a very ordinary warehouse painted pink and then ‘loaded’ with symbolic and expressive features, this being the exact theory of the style.

• An achingly Instagram-able street, Bark Place, of linked semi-detached cottages with arched windows, whose owners appear to have cooperated so that all the most beautiful pastel colours are used, but only once. Rather impressive.

• Less than 100m apart, all completed between 1878-80, and all listed, the New West End Synagogue, the Aghia Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral, and St Matthew, an ‘Early English’ (a Gothic Revival style) Parish Church with a remarkable tall and slim, pinnacled spire.

• A fragment of that Bayswater development inheritance, ‘back-to-front’, (one-sided) terraces, their fronts facing the backs of the next, with street trees, perhaps once intended to be part of a central garden square, planted in the narrow footways, the massive trunks now filling their full width (Ossington Street and others): one has to walk, carefully, in the road!

Venue for our refreshments, ‘The Champion’ PH, at the very south-west tip of Bayswater, marks the boundary with Kensington, at the road called ‘Notting Hill Gate’, after the tollgate on the Oxford Road approaching the district called Notting Hill, a real hill whose summit was in Ladbroke Grove.

After lunch, in a new feature of USW events, you are invited to pass through the security checkpoints--in place only because it is a private road--and having promised not to take any photographs, join me for a gentle bonus ‘stroll’ down the entire 800m of the Kensington Palace Gardens, with its trees at their most spectacular.

It is a unique in all London, lined with 30 vast mansions, developed in the 1840’s, to fund improvements to Kensington Palace, on land formerly used for its kitchen gardens.

Many are now home to embassies or ambassadors’ residences, adorned with flags and emblems.

At the very end, in Palace Green, there is the house Philip Webb designed for the artist George Howard, and the one the writer W M Thackeray designed for himself, before we head to Gloucester Road Station for onward travel.

Hope you can come!

Andy

*’Louis Mancini’, in ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’, 1949
**Sir John Summerson, Georgian London, pp.23, 290
*** from Messrs Fenton Whelan’s site hoardings