Within urban W2 the two dominating features are Paddington station and the next-door St. Mary's Hospital. The Heathrow Express arrived in 1998, and so great a success has it been that 27 airline check-in desks are now at the station. St. Mary's is still one of London's major hospitals, with a full A&E and a comprehensive array of other services.
These twin monoliths face on to Praed Street, the high street for Paddington. Things have cleaned up here considerably, the gambling and vice industries moving out in the mid-Eighties. There is now a variety of shops here, all bemoaning the strict parking regulations that deny passing trade.
The eastern boundary of W2 is Edgware Road, the A5 beginning its long and straight haul to Holyhead in Wales. It is a good introduction to the global mix of W2, with bars, clubs, offices and markets which reflect the high Arab and Muslim content of the area. Lebanon is particularly well-represented. On Sundays there is the art market running the length of Bayswater Road; the quality oscillates wildly.
Another worry for the traders here is the gargantuan redevelopment of Paddington Basin and Paddington Goods Station. Hyped as London's biggest reworking since the Isle of Dogs, the basin will contain 8 million sq. ft. and the goods yard 1.5 million sq. ft. of "built environment".
British Waterways are doing their bit by bringing the basin back into the national network. Railtrack are getting into the act with their renovation of the station, complete with 42-storey landmark tower, and the Hilton London Metropole will be Europe's biggest hotel at 1,073 bedrooms. They are also refurbishing the Great Western Hotel to provide another 355 rooms.
The overall plan is to mix offices with housing and retail with leisure. The goods yard will have 200 apartments with a health centre, West End Quay by the basin will have 453 apartments and 100 homes will be affordable housing via shared ownership under the aegis of the Peabody Trust. After much prevarication, the work is now under way.
Area Description: Bayswater
The centre of life for Bayswater is the L-shaped high street formed by Queensway and Westbourne Grove. Dominant at their junction is Whiteleys, reborn since its demise in 1981. It was London's first department store (1863) and its popularity with local traders can be gauged by them burning the effigy of William Whiteley in 1876.
This was not William's lowest moment; he was shot dead in his own office in 1907. Its selling point upon opening was that it could procure any item for anybody, and it now receives 11.5 million visitors each year, half of them locals. If Hitler had ever got to London, he would have used this, his favourite London building, as his HQ. Open every day but Christmas day, the only dead weekend it suffers is during Notting Hill Carnival.
Like Praed Street, Westbourne Grove and its side roads have cleaned up their act in recent times, and some marvellous restaurants offer Indian, Chinese, Italian, Thai and Sudanese food. Queensway is flashier, more tourist-oriented, appropriate for its vantage on to Kensington Gardens and its two tube stations. To stroll up it is to feel that every nation on earth (and a few more besides) has sent a few anonymous ambassadors just to make sure that it is represented at the 24/7 Republic of Queensway.
W2 is not a place to see shows or visit museums or galleries (though exceptions are the Toy & Model museum on Craven Hill and the Fleming Laboratory at Norfolk Place). Unlike perhaps any other central postcode it is uniquely residential. No London postcode must have as fast a turnover of residents as here, despite the opulence of the properties.
If the parks are the lungs of London, then Hyde Park (and Kensington Gardens) is surely the mother lode. Its popularity and range of activities are staggering. It feels a lot bigger on the ground than it looks on the A -Z, possibly by being something of an optical illusion; in the city you get used to having no horizon, and now, just for once, you have one. The Park and the Gardens come to 615 acres.
HousingThe eastern part of Bayswater is dominated by multi-occupancy stucco houses and some mews, with the opulence of Lancaster Gate and Porchester Terrace among them. As we enter Paddington, we find some old rail and canal workers' cottages by the station. A 1980 Housing Action plan stopped further slides into dereliction and this area now has new mews and hotels and boarding houses.
The south-eastern corner is the Hyde Park Estate, Tyburnia. Retained and renovated by the Church Commissioners, it has W2's concentration of classy housing. Modern housing has its own parking spaces. There are many squares and crescents here, and the outcome is a heady brew of Regency stucco, mews, Housing Association flats and a forest of colonnades.
Either side of the Westway falls into W2 as well, and the mark of the GLC can be found here in the houses split into flats in the Sixties and in communal grounds set up by them. The low-rise Sixties Warwick Estate is here and so is Paddington Green, squashed between tower blocks and the Westway. There are many kinds of flats here.
The north-west corner of W2 ranges from flat-fronted brick apartments to detached villas. The long Talbot Road in particular has undergone massive renovation and all around Westway is set for massive change with Paddington Basin and the Bishops Bridge Goods Station all under rebuilding - of which more in the next section.
TransportBuses concentrate their activities on the major thoroughfares of Bayswater Road, Edgware Road and Westbourne Grove/Bishops Bridge Road/Praed Street. There are strict anti-rat run regulations here, and one trader on Praed Street reckons that since one-way traffic was enforced, vehicles passing through have halved in number.
The Westway is the closest a motorway gets to central London and begins its long haul to Solihull at Lisson Grove. This unmissable architectural wonder is currently undergoing the Westway Project, an attempt to brighten it up and make more use of the under-road space.
The nexus of the underground is Notting Hill Gate at the south-western tip of W2, which is the junction between the Central Line going west-east and taking in Queensway, Lancaster Gate and Marble Arch and the District and Circle Lines heading north-east to Bayswater, Paddington and Edgware Road. By the Westway, Royal Oak is on the Hammersmith & City Line.
Steve Roberts
HistoryPadda was an Anglo-Saxon chieftain who recognised the importance of setting up by the conjunction of two Roman routes (now Edgware and Bayswater Roads) and who doubtless would have been even happier had the canal and station already been here.
Bayswater and Paddington resisted assimilation into London until surprisingly late. The Church Commissioners kept it as a nice little earner, leasing out the farmland and springs, although Paddington did attract a posse of Huguenot weavers, who were organised enough to set up a carpet factory here in 1750. A few French nobles followed in their wake, fleeing the democratic tenor of the Revolution at home.
There was a more sinster reason for W2's late arrival into the urban world. Where Edgware Road meets Marble Arch there is a small circular stone plaque, an insufficient memoir for Tyburn Tree, London's principal place of execution from 1388 to 1783.
Hanging was done in the most perfunctory manner, and if you were the poor unfortunate then you looked to your nearest and dearest to pull and drag you by the feet to hasten your exit from this world - this was not the hangman's job.
From 1571 its triangular structure allowed the simultaneous hanging of 21 people, and the violence and rowdiness that the crowd produced at every hanging precluded the notion of living close by.
In 1795 things finally kicked off. The Grand Junction Canal received permission from the Church to extend their waterway from Brentford to here and in the same year building leases were first allowed for the area. Development was piecemeal, but a planned scheme was Tyburnia, now better known as the Hyde Park Estate. To its north was Tomlin's Town, a pile of shacks that grew up around the new canal terminus, but otherwise the new district was starting life high up the class ladder.
In the classic film comedy "Kind Hearts and Coronets" Louis Mazzini, played by Dennis Price, rebukes his childhood rival Lionel for renting rooms on the wrong side of Hyde Park.
It became a tad fashionable for the residents of Belgravia to scoff at the parvenus of W2, but this only proved the lie - the area was a big success with City merchants and artistic types alike, who liked the large edifices that were springing up in this new quarter of London. This became the land of colonnades and stucco, a reputation that remains in spite of rebuilds and war damage.
The park has been a feature of London for four centuries. Seized by the Crown at the Reformation, it remained closed off until it opened to the public at the start of the 17th century. It was an instant success, and has remained open ever since (with an understandable military break in the first Civil War).
At the Restoration the park was retaken by the Crown and monarchical attempts to create a carriage road called Route De Roi - the Road of the King - was sardonically translated by Londoners into Rotten Row. The name has survived.
Kensington Gardens, effectively the western third of the park, was opened to the public in 1726, providing they were "respectably dressed people". In 1730 the River Westbourne was dammed to create the Serpentine.
Hyde Park now entered its cheerfully chequered life, the scene of highwaymen, duels and jingoistic military pageants. Gates, arches, fountains and statues went up over the years, and following several attempts to carve out an area for peaceful debate, Speakers' Corner was established in 1872 as a rightful place of peaceful assembly. 1851 saw Joseph Paxton's massive Crystal Palace house the Great Exhibition and in the 1970s over 9,000 trees were lost to Dutch Elm disease.
The arrival of Paddington station in 1838 would change this part of the world forever. The station is still London's terminus for the south-west and Wales and the current train shed was built in 1851 by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who designed the layout, and M.D. Wyatt, who created the ornamentation. Philip Hardwick's Great Western Hotel was the biggest in England upon completion.
Tyburnia's success encouraged more development further west in Bayswater, although the general expiration of leases later in the 1930s would see large sections rebuilt. But from the mid-19th century Paddington would attract peoples from all over the world, and by the early 20th century this would mutate into one of the most deprived areas of inner London.
Political refugees would seek the anonymity of Paddington. Eastbourne Terrace, the west side of the station, was one long parade of brothels. One vicar, recently reminiscing about his time here said that his congregation changed entirely every four years; a fast turnover of residents remains the norm.
And this was the land where Peter Rachman operated, the epitomy of slumlordism. While living in a Hampstead mansion, he ran a slum empire which forced thousands of immigrants into overcrowded accommodation. His methods were swift and brutal, and in the case of one family in Bayswater who refused to pay a hike in the rent, he merely sent his boys round and had the roof removed.
A recent scar running through W2 is Westway, created in the late Sixties and opened in July 1970, carrying the Marylebone Road off the ground and hopefully helping those escaping the capital to reach greener pastures. On Friday evenings it can be a conspicuous failure.
Paddington has been on an upswing since its bleaker times, although a certain seediness endures around the hostels and boarding houses of Sussex Gardens. Bayswater is now exceedingly exclusive, a land of diplomatic plates. But W2 has kept a firm hold on one element of its chequered past. A walk down Queensway can afford the listener more languages than he or she could hear on any street in the capital. W2 invented the word cosmopolitan.
Steve Roberts.
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