Leinster Gardens looks like any other Bayswater street, with its long sweeping mid-Victorian terraces. But all is not as it seems, indeed two of the houses secretly aren't there at all.
The terrace on the left was built around 1855, a wall of white stucco five storeys high. At ground level the houses have projecting porches, each paired with a neighbour, supported by Ionic columns. The first floor windows are flanked by fluted columns topped with a shallow pediment, and set behind a continuous balustraded balcony. The upper floors have smaller balconies, and progressively less decoration, but the overall effect is of a seamless architectural whole. This is very much not the case.
At numbers 23 and 24 the doors don't open, and for very good reason. The downstairs windows are completely absent, merely white panels somebody hoped you wouldn't notice. None of the upstairs windows have glass in them, just grey paint, the telltale reflections from their neighbours betraying the deception. And although the other houses in the terrace have an extra extension set back atop the mansard roof, numbers 23 and 24 have nothing. And that's because they're not really there.
Initially this was a quiet part of town, as well as well-to-do. But then the railways came, specifically the newfangled Underground railway which burst into action between Paddington and Farringdon in 1863. It was so successful that additional westbound extensions were built almost immediately, the first above ground to Hammersmith, the second below ground to South Kensington. This veered off from the original line after Edgware Road, first stop Paddington Praed Street, second stop Bayswater. Leinster Gardens' misfortune was to lie on the path inbetween. [map 1868][map 1896]
Digging an underground railway was a messy disruptive business in the 1860s. Cut and cover methods had to be used, which involved digging a very big trench, adding a railway and then covering over the top. The 1863 railway had followed main roads, so only disrupted traffic, but here in Bayswater the line was forced to duck beneath a residential neighbourhood. A photograph in the LT collection shows digging underway at Craven Hill, one street before Leinster Gardens, the road thick with mud, a deep trench to one side and access to neighbouring houses seriously compromised.
At Leinster Gardens engineers took drastic action to cross the terrace and demolished numbers 23 and 24 entirely. Rather than rebuilding after construction they left the railway open to the sky, because in those days steam trains needed intermittent ventilation and this was an ideal spot. But because wealthy local residents would have complained if the gap in their terrace had been left empty, a false facade was built recreating the two missing houses, front view only. It remains unnecessarily impressively convincing.
But if you head round the back, via a convenient alley, the secret is revealed. Porchester Terrace does have a house-less break in it, through which can be seen the backs of the real houses in Leinster Gardens and the gap inbetween. Both sides have to be supported by girders to prevent collapse. The brick parapet in front of the cutting is quite high, so the best view is probably from across the pavement, but a camera waved over the wall reveals the deeper panorama down to the tracks below. Time it right and you might even catch a train passing through.
Yet from the front you might never know, indeed there are tales of modern residents in flats to either side having no idea that their neighbours didn't exist. The 'houses' at numbers 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens may be Grade II listed but in reality are only a few feet thick, and one of the more delightfully quirky corners of London's Underground network.
This post is from an occasional series of things you probably already knew, but that I hadn't properly blogged about before. I gave Leinster Gardens fairly short shrift back in 2010, as a subsection of a subsection of a broader post, so this time I thought I'd do it justice. Sorry if you thought you'd heard it all before. But it strikes me that sometimes it's important to blog the obvious stuff, rather than forever chasing the increasingly obscure, because there'll always be people to whom the 'well-known' is fresh and original.
