Sorry, that's a bad question. I don't mean the highest above sea level, not like the highest station I blogged about on Thursday. And letters aren't generally higher than other letters, F isn't higher than E, it's more an alphabetical order thing. But, for example, if 9A, 9B, 9C, 9D, 9E and 9F were six neighbouring houses then 9F would be the highest lettered house. So what I'm really asking is what's the latest letter in the alphabet to appear in a London house number? Are we talking 46G, 137K or 5Z?
I'm not talking flats here, where lettered addresses can be very common, I'm talking an actual house. And no I can't be 100% certain about the highest because it's not something you can check, not without a database of every address in London. But I suspect I've found London's highest lettered house because I can't believe there's a higher one anywhere else. Pick a letter, place your bets.
I was looking out of the window of a bus in Willesden when I saw an alphanumeric house number so surprising I had to get off and take a closer look. I found myself on Brondesbury Park, a lengthy road running parallel to Willesden Lane close to Brondesbury Park station. It's only a very short walk from the Cambodian Embassy, which I stumbled upon in a similarly serendipitous manner back in 2019. "I'm a firm believer that if you walk around London enough you'll eventually stumble upon something bloggable," I wrote. And now I can add riding buses to that list.
This is where the sequence starts... 18 Brondesbury Park.
It's a large detached house, Thirties style, with a fairly unusual name. I don't know how you're supposed to pronounce Neuhawce, given it's very much a made-up word, but if it's supposed to mean 'New House' that's odd because it isn't. What's also of note is that nextdoor isn't number 16 it's a long block of flats named after a local notable. The 'even' side of the road kicks off with number 8, then number 10, then these intrusive later flats (which aren't numbered) and then number 18 which is Neuhawce. Where it all starts getting odd is at the next house which you might imagine was going to be 18A but no, it's 18J.
18J also goes by the name Belmont and is of similar broad-fronted interwar stock. The owners have actually written 18j on their sign for a little lower case frisson. I had a good hunt hereabouts but no, this really is the nextdoor house to number 18, because numbers 18A-18I are nowhere to be seen. If your guess was any letter prior to J it was very much too low and you might want to have another shot.
And on we go...
The next four houses are 18K, 18L, 18M and 18N. They're all substantial detached piles, three of them six-bedders with a potential asking price of £3-4 million. 18N is the exception because it's subdivided into five flats, and as a bonus was recently refurbished so has a website allow you to snoop inside. It's all sleek white walls and luxury silver-grey fittings, i.e. very little of the original interior exists. Also I see the URL they chose was 18brondesburypark.wordpress.com, I guess because the more accurate 18Nbrondesburypark.wordpress.com would have been counter-intuitive.
Here's what this section of Brondesbury Park looks like... fine suburban living on a broad leafy avenue. The road bearing off on the left is called Manor House Drive and loops back in an elongated crescent rejoining further up. And this is a huge clue to what's actually going on here, because this used to be the site of Brondesbury Manor House, a moated manor first recorded in the 13th century. It was rebuilt in the 18th century as a three-storeyed villa, the main home of Lady Sarah Salusbury, who in 1789 had the grounds landscaped by the legendary Humphry Repton. All gone. The grand mansion was demolished in 1934 and its remaining grounds sold off for housing, hence the creation of Manor House Drive. [1894 map][1954 map][2023 map]
Brondesbury Park, the street, had been built 50 years previously with a big gap where the manor house's frontage took precedence. Back then it had made sense that the manor house was number 18, between St Monica's Hospital for Sick Children at number 16 and a new villa at number 20. But after Brondesbury Manor was demolished the new houses in the intermediate gap all had to be 18 something instead. I have no idea why the first was 18 and the next was 18J but, given the hiatus was a full 200 yards long, we still have some way to go.
The next four houses are 18P, 18Q, 18R and 18S. 18O has not been used for obvious ambiguity reasons. As you can see they're all really smart properties with spiky fences, with the exception of 18Q where the only house number I could see had been scrawled on the rubbish bin. Also old maps confirm that all these houses have kept the original names they were given when they were built... Belmont, Rayleigh, Overton, Newlyn and Delmore in the previous photos and Everon, Shirley, Beechcroft and Uplands here. Generic distinguished names of the kind developers often used, seemingly with no connection, but if you check out the initial letters you might see what's actually going on here!
So we're not finished yet.
This is the house that drew my attention from the bus, mainly because its nameplates have a bright yellow background. The nameplate facing outwards on the gatepost is actually a numberplate, and technically 18T is the numberplate for a Mercedes-Benz S-Class so I'm surprised they were allowed to get it printed. This is Rutland, the tenth house squeezed into the gap between number 18 and number 20, a sequence that's now delivered us from 18J to 18T. And of course it starts with R because so far the initial letters of the house names have spelt out B, R, O, N, D, E, S, B, U, R. There must be one more starting with Y to go.
This is 18U Brondesbury Park, aka Yelverton, which I can confirm is the final lettered house in this unlikely sequence. It's a chunky gabled villa with a double garage and again a highly defensive perimeter, so much so that the postie can only deliver to a small white mailbox out front. I guess addressing mail to Yelverton works just as well as addressing it to 18U, indeed I'm not entirely sure why these named houses ever needed to have numbers too. It's also still baffling why the sequence starts at 18J and not the more logical 18A, because in that case the highest lettered house would only be 18L. But instead the capital's highest lettered house is 18U Brondesbury Park London NW6 7DL.
(unless by some unlikely chance there's a V, W, X, Y or Z somewhere else)
