Bayswater

• 1. Introduction

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  Bayswater holds 17,500 people in every square kilometre. It is a built-up district of the City of Westminster, in west Central London. Kensington Gardens lies to its south, Paddington to its north-east and Notting Hill to its west.

  The name sounds like a pond, a puddle or a quiet stretch of canal. Nothing about the crowded streets suggests water at all.

  So the questions are simple. Who first called this place by that name, and what did they mean by it? Who built the streets that now fill the district, and who came to live in them? And why did so many novelists, playwrights, film-makers and musicians keep sending their characters to this particular corner of London?

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• 2. Bayard's Watering Place

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  The name Bayswater comes from a placename recorded in 1380: Bayards Watering Place. In Middle English the phrase could describe a spot where horses were watered. It could just as easily describe a watering place that belonged to a family named Bayard. The name alone leaves both readings open.

  By the seventeenth century the place was a hamlet, close to the Kensington Gravel Pits. It lay to the west of Westminster, on the road that ran from Tyburn towards Uxbridge. Travellers passed through it on their way somewhere else.

  Even at the end of the eighteenth century Bayswater was still a small settlement. Then Westminster began to grow westward into Mayfair and Paddington, and the outskirts of the city came steadily closer to the hamlet.

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• 3. Russian Names

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  Moscow Road and St. Petersburgh Place were both laid out by a developer named Edward Orme. He named them in honour of Alexander I of Russia. Orme was among the first important builders in Bayswater, and those two street names are his lasting signature.

  His work belonged to the Regency era. New suburbs were going up rapidly across London at that time, because the population of the Metropolis kept growing and needed somewhere to live.

  Tyburnia, the neighbouring district to the east, was being built in the same years. The two areas developed independently of each other, each with its own builders and its own plans. Over the following decades the remaining open ground in Bayswater was gradually covered with houses.

  Behind Orme's Russian names, the streets were about to fill with Victorian stucco terraces.

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• 4. Stucco and Estates

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  Much of Bayswater was built in the 1800s. Its streets and garden squares are lined with Victorian stucco terraces, and some of those terraces have since been divided into flats.

  The district became an area of affluent residential streets. After the Second World War it went through a period of decline.

  The Hallfield Estate shows a different side of the district. It contains 650 flats and is Grade II listed. Its designers were Berthold Lubetkin and Sir Denys Lasdun.

  Commerce gathers along Queensway and Westbourne Grove, the busiest high streets. Independent shops, boutiques and chain retailers sit beside restaurants.

  Two tube stations stand inside the district, Bayswater and Queensway. Paddington, Royal Oak and Lancaster Gate lie just beyond its edges.

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• 5. Many Nations

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  Malaysians, Greeks, French, Italians, Chinese, Brazilians, Russians and Arabs all appear among the notable groups living in Bayswater, alongside the English. The district counts as one of the most cosmopolitan in London.

  A high concentration of hotels adds even more people to this mix. The permanent population is diverse, and visitors keep arriving on top of it.

  The late nineteenth century brought two established communities, one Greek and one Jewish. Each built a place of worship in the district. Both buildings are now listed Grade I.

  Those residents are represented by six councillors on Westminster City Council. Three sit for Bayswater ward and three for Lancaster Gate ward.

  After the 2022 elections, five of the six belonged to the Labour Party and one to the Conservatives. Bayswater ward was entirely Labour. Lancaster Gate was split between the two parties, which makes it a marginal ward.

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• 6. Famous Residents

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  Guglielmo Marconi, the pioneer of wireless communication, lived at 71 Hereford Road between 1896 and 1897. He shared the house with his mother, soon after arriving in England. A blue plaque marks the spot.

  In the late 1970s, Sting occupied a basement flat at 28A Leinster Square. Those were the formative years of The Police. Trudie Styler, now his wife, lived in a basement flat two doors away.

  Bayswater also sheltered writers and artists. J. M. Barrie, the playwright and novelist, lived at 100 Bayswater Road with his wife, Mary. The cartoonist John Tenniel was born at 22 Gloucester Place, New Road, Bayswater, on the 28th of February 1820.

  Irfan Orga, an exile and writer, lived at three addresses on Inverness Terrace, numbers 29, 35 and 21. His stay ran from 1942 until the mid-1950s. In 1950 he published his memoirs, Portrait of a Turkish Family. The Irish artist Reginald Gray lived with his wife Catherine at 105a Queensway from 1958 to 1963.

  Science has its own entries. Francis Guthrie, whose observations led to the Four color theorem, is listed among the residents. So is the physicist J. B. Gunn, who lived at 14 Durham Terrace in the 1940s. His mother, a Freudian psychoanalyst, lived there with him.

  Politicians and public figures fill another corner of the list. Richard Cobden lived on Westbourne Terrace. Luigi Sturzo, a Catholic priest and politician, helped found the Italian People's Party in 1919 and is counted among the fathers of Christian democracy. Umaru Dikko, a former Nigerian minister of transportation, also lived here. So did Ilyich Ramírez Sánchez, known as Carlos the Jackal.

  Winston Churchill, Tony Blair and Alexander Fleming appear on the same list. One resident, the performer Tim Dry, has stayed since the early 1980s.

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• 7. On the Page

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  In Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Bracknell says that a perambulator, carrying baby Jack, was found "standing by itself in a remote corner of Bayswater". Saki's short story "Cross Currents", from 1909, puts Vanessa Pennington on a "Bayswater back street". She would have preferred "smarter surroundings".

  In Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder's father lives in Bayswater. Anthony Powell's The Acceptance World, from 1955, is the third volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. In it, Nick Jenkins meets Uncle Giles for tea at the Ufford Hotel, "riding at anchor on the sluggish Bayswater tide". Martin Amis's Success places its two main characters in a shared flat in the district. He calls it "the district of transients."

  John le Carré used Bayswater twice. In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, a character named Liz belongs to the Bayswater South Branch of the Communist Party. In Smiley's People, the retired Estonian general turned British spy, Vladimir, lives in a dingy flat on Westbourne Grove.

  Samuel Selvon's novel The Lonely Londoners has many of its characters living in Bayswater. In Iris Murdoch's A Word Child, Hilary Burde keeps a "flatlet" near Bayswater Tube Station. Linda Stratmann's The Poisonous Seed is set almost entirely in Victorian Bayswater. In Lauren Willig's Pink Carnation series, Eloise Kelly lives there while writing her doctoral thesis. In Herbert Jenkins's novel Patricia Brent, Spinster, the heroine lives at Gavin House, a boarding house.

  The Italian comics series Dylan Dog goes further, giving its hero an address on Craven Road.

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• 8. Screen and Song

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  A House in Bayswater, released in 1959, carries the district's name in its title. Cameras have returned many times since.

  Alfred Hitchcock's film Frenzy was shot in the area. Scenes in Alfie, from 1966, were filmed around Chepstow Road. The Black Windmill also refers to the district, and its scenes were filmed around it too.

  Whiteleys is frequently seen in film. It appears in Love Actually and Closer. My Fair Lady refers to it as well, in the Pygmalion story where Eliza Doolittle is sent "to Whiteleys to be attired". Princess Productions keeps its studios on the top floor. The Whiteleys Shopping Centre is currently under reconstruction.

  Music has its own small tribute. Iron Maiden released a bonus track called "Bayswater Ain't a Bad Place to Be" on their single "Be Quick or Be Dead". The title is a modest verdict from a band that had no obvious reason to flatter the place.

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