Paddington Green
Paddington Green originally consisted of wasteland occupying a central position on the estate which
supported the almoner of Westminster. The name
came to be applied both to the surrounding village
and to a small part of the open space, east of the late
18th-century church. The area described below is
larger: bounded north-east by Edgware Road, south
and for much of the south-west by the Grand Junction canal, and north-west by the Regent's canal, it
corresponds with the north-eastern part of Church
ward as created in 1901. (fn. 25)
When the green was first recorded in 1549 it
spread southward across Harrow Road near its junction with Edgware Road. Presumably the medieval
chapel stood near the middle of the north side of the
waste, as did the 17th-century church, which was
farther north than its successor. (fn. 26) In 1647 a large
house adjoined the northern side of the churchyard,
with another to the east; one of them was the manor
house, perhaps the building in use by 1582, and
nearby there was also a divided vicarage house. (fn. 27) A
fishpond was mentioned in 1617 (fn. 28) and the lord had
six ponds on the green in 1647, by which date
encroachments included a tenement and two small
gardens. (fn. 29)
The buildings around the green and those a little
farther east, rounding the junction of Harrow and
Edgware roads, constituted a single settlement. The
description of properties in 1773 as in the Square or
as in Paddington may have represented an attempt
to distinguish the green from Edgware Road, (fn. 30) but
the only distinctions made in 1552 and 1664 had
been between Paddington and Westbourne. (fn. 31) 'The
town of Paddington' was a term used in 1757, (fn. 32) although the locality was normally described as a village until the building of Tyburnia joined it to
London. (fn. 33)
By 1746 there were houses from Edgware Road
along Harrow Road to a little way beyond the green
and along Church Street to the north. Others faced
the east side of the green. A pond, perhaps formed
out of several earlier ones, lay on the south side of
Harrow Road. (fn. 34) Presumably it was the church pond,
from which no mud or sand was to be taken in
1722. (fn. 35) Almshouses were built west of the pond,
probably in 1714, (fn. 36) and throughout the 18th century
other parcels of waste were taken for cottages or as
additions to the gardens of larger houses. (fn. 37) Paddington House or its predecessor had been built on the
east side of the green and was freehold by 1720, when
the owner Denis Chirac, a retired jeweller, was admitted to some waste in front of it. (fn. 38) Probably it was
the three-storeyed house, with elm trees and a small
pond nearby, drawn by John Chatelaine in 1750. (fn. 39)
In 1753 a neighbour pulled down the fence on the
green of Chirac's son and namesake, who had received permission to inclose. (fn. 40) Railings separated the
green from Harrow Road by 1750 (fn. 41) and the vestry,
seeking ballast for road repairs, in 1757 agreed to
work only a patch on the edge of the green, in order
not to hamper the letting of houses. (fn. 42) In a 19thcentury novel, by a resident who might have drawn
on local tradition, the village in the 1750s was depicted as no more than a few houses at the eastern
end of Harrow Road, with some better ones, inhabited by retired tradesmen and lady annuitants,
around the green, and a church whose graveyard was
shadowed by elms in the grounds of the manor
house. (fn. 43)
In the later 18th century the village continued to
offer a rural retreat. A 'handsome house' with walled
garden near the Edgware Road junction and a new
large brick house at the upper end of the green were
advertised, probably in 1768 and 1783 respectively. (fn. 44)
The Hon. Charles Greville (d. 1809) lived by the
green with Emma Hart, the future Lady Hamilton,
from 1782 to 1786 and later built a bigger house at
the north-eastern corner, on the site of the modern
technical college. (fn. 45) Greville's garden adjoining
Church Street was stocked with imported plants, as
was that of Chirac's house to the south, on the site of
the children's hospital, when occupied from c. 1797
until 1826 by John Symmons, who employed the
botanical nurseryman William Salisbury. (fn. 46) North of
Greville's house there was a new house in 1807, together with a building called the banqueting house,
in gardens which contained a small lake and an
island. (fn. 47)
In contrast with gentlemen's residences were cottages, including one on the west side of the green
which survived until 1896; originally a pair of cottages, of flint and rubble roughcast and with a steep
thatched roof, it presumably resembled many of the
18th century or earlier. (fn. 48) A reminiscence of Paddington in the 1780s noted the alehouses, with long
troughs for watering the teams of hay wagons and
with signs spanning Edgware Road. Tall elms
screened the inns and formed the most impressive
feature of the green, drawing most of the landscape
painters of London. (fn. 49)
The ultimate preservation of part of Paddington
green was foreshadowed in 1753, when the lord, at
the petition of several residents, granted land called
the green in front of their houses to Denis Chirac. It
was to be inclosed with posts and open rails, as had
been done before, and to serve as an ornament to the
parish, rights of way being unaffected. (fn. 50) In 1779 land
called the green, with the site of the almshouses and
ground in front of them and to the east, was vested
in the lawyer Francis Maseres (1731-1824) and two
other trustees for the benefit of the parish. (fn. 51) Maseres
had been left all the real estate of the second Denis
Chirac, (fn. 52) and the trust presumably included inclosures which had been made in front of Paddington
House. The rebuilding of the church between 1788
and 1791 placed it near the middle of the green,
which it helped to divide, the northern section
eventually being taken for burials. (fn. 53) Seats on the
green and the fence around it were in bad repair in
1803, when the trustees' lessee John Symmons refused to pay for their replacement. (fn. 54) In 1805 Charles
Greville submitted suggestions for improving the
green. (fn. 55) A different plan was adopted in 1807, for
immediate work to be financed by private subscriptions and future upkeep by the highway rates, and in
1808 Symmons formally ceded management of the
green to the vestry. (fn. 56)
Meanwhile seclusion was threatened by the canals
and the gradual advance of London. Obstruction in
Edgware Road, by carters around the White Lion,
gave rise to complaint in 1795. (fn. 57) Although industry
did not spread as widely as had been expected, (fn. 58) a
rising poor population, presumably around the canal
basin or on building sites farther south rather than
at Paddington green itself, led to demands for a
school, built in Harrow Road in 1802, (fn. 59) and for a
poorhouse. It was hoped that the poorhouse might
replace the decayed manor house, whose grounds
were needed for the overcrowded churchyard. (fn. 60)
Prosecutions for dumping night-soil on the wharves
by the canal had greatly increased in 1808 and petitions were sent to the bishop and parliament against
the proposed Regent's canal. (fn. 61) Once the Regent's
canal had been opened, however, it seems to have
benefited residents: some canal traffic was diverted,
select villas were built in Maida Hill West (later
Maida Avenue and treated below as part of Little
Venice), (fn. 62) and the canal was advertised as offering
beautiful views from a house on the north side of
Paddington green. (fn. 63) Along Edgware Road, there
were houses in Philpott Terrace and Devonshire
Place, north of Church Street, by 1811. (fn. 64) With little
room towards Edgware Road or towards the basin,
the bishop and his lessees inevitably decided to build
west of the church. Their architect S. P. Cockerell,
himself a vestryman, in 1812 submitted a plan for
nearly 100 tall and closely packed terraced houses on
nursery ground, in new roads which afterwards
formed Park Place (later St. Mary's Terrace) and
Porteus Road. (fn. 65) The road in Park Place, however,
was not sufficiently well made for the parish to take
it over in 1824 (fn. 66) and only a single terrace had been
built there, opposite Porteus Road, by 1828. (fn. 67)
Older village features gradually disappeared. The
parish was authorized to buy the manor house in
1810 and demolished it in 1824, enabling the churchyard to be enlarged to the north. (fn. 68) The pond on the
south side of Harrow Road had been used as a rubbish tip by the turnpike trustees' surveyor in 1813
when the vestry, anxious about drainage, insisted
that it should not be filled up. In 1818, when there
was a pumping-engine house nearby, the Grand
Junction Canal Co. was allowed to fill in the western
part of the pond in order to construct a short way
(later Church Place) from Harrow Road to North
Wharf Road. The parish in return received a strip of
land east of the almshouses, (fn. 69) where a free school was
built in 1822, either then or soon afterwards replacing the remains of the pond. (fn. 70) A new vestry room
behind the almshouses was ready in 1823 (fn. 71) and the
company had constructed more ways to North
Wharf Road, later Hermitage Street to the west and
Green Street to the east, in 1828, by which date North
Wharf and Irongate Wharf roads, serving the basin,
were lined with buildings or yards. Both Hermitage
Street, containing a watchhouse where the fire
engine was also kept, and Church Place were taken
as parish roads in 1828. (fn. 72)
Fashionable churchgoers could attend Bayswater
chapel from 1818 or St. John's, Southwick Crescent,
from 1832. Despite the provision of a large vicarage
house at the corner of Park Place and Porteus Road,
St. Mary's ceased to be the parish church in 1845.
Part of the green immediately west of it, which had
been bought as more burial ground in 1843, was
taken instead for a new vestry hall in 1853. (fn. 73) North
of the hall, a short way leading from Park Place to
the church was called Stanley Place in 1846, when 6
houses were to be built there, (fn. 74) and St. Mary's
Square from 1864. (fn. 75) A police station was built in
Dudley Grove, the stretch of Harrow Road west of
the hall, in 1864. Both the vestry hall, which became
the town hall, and the police station were afterwards
enlarged, giving some dignity to a run down neighbourhood at the price of being separated from many
of Paddington's later public buildings in Bayswater. (fn. 76)
The building of the new vestry hall (fn. 77) reduced the
open space to an area comprising the churchyard,
the burial ground to the north, a four-sided plot (the
modern Paddington green) east of the church, and a
plot east of the free school on the south side of
Harrow Road. The last was built over between 1842
and 1855, with working-class terraces in Victoria and
Albert streets, which ran parallel to Church Place
and Green Street, and also facing the green in
Harrow Road.
West and north-west of the green, the vicarage was
still the only house on the west side of Park Place in
1840, although Porteus Road and the parallel Fulham Place and Howley Place were already projected.
Building agreements for some of the houses in Howley Place were made in 1841 and, with Matthew
Wyatt, for some in Porteus Road in 1846-7. (fn. 78) The
roads had been built up by 1855, when the vicarage
itself had made way for St. Mary's Terrace, where
the houses were stuccoed and had pillared porches.
Porteus Road and Fulham Place were also terraced
and middle-class. Nearer the Regent's canal, detached and semi-detached houses, with larger gardens, lined Park Place Villas and the north side of
Howley Place.
To the north and north-east there was still open
ground behind the villas of Maida Hill West and the
denser housing along Edgware Road, although Hall
Place, running north from Church Street parallel
with Edgware Road, had been named by 1828. It
was built up for Benjamin Edward Hall, a local
gentleman. (fn. 79) Many large semi-detached houses stood
in the northern part of Hall Place, then called Hall
Park, and in and around Crompton Street, then
called Elm Tree Place, by 1842.
Efforts were made to preserve some of the village's
18th-century charm. When the former manor house
garden was cleared of its undergrowth in 1825, the
timber and ornamental trees were to be retained. (fn. 80)
The Act of 1824 authorized refencing and planting
of the green, (fn. 81) which in 1839 was to be enclosed with
iron railings and kerbstones. (fn. 82) Artists still lived in
the neighbourhood, although Bayswater became increasingly popular. (fn. 83) They included William Sawrey
Gilpin (1762-1843), first president of the Old Watercolour Society and a parish officer, in Harrow Road
in 1803 and Edgware Road by 1805, Cornelius
Varley (1781-1873) at Junction Place, Paddington
green, before 1811, and Joshua Cristall (1767-1847)
at the manor house from 1812 to 1816. (fn. 84) George
Barret the younger (d. 1842), of Philpott Terrace,
Edgware Road, exhibited views of the canal and the
enlarged St. Mary's churchyard. Thomas Uwins
(1782-1857) spent periods at Paddington green from
1834, Edward Calvert (1799-1883) lived in Park
Place, where he printed his woodcuts, from c. 1832
to 1851, and William Henry Pyne (1769-1843) was
briefly in Dudley Grove in 1835. The sculptor
Matthew Cotes Wyatt (1777-1862), who with his
sons took leases for several new houses in Tyburnia, (fn. 85)
was at Dudley Grove House probably from 1843
until his death.
The green's attractions could not survive the
urbanization which took place around it in the mid
19th century. Edgware Road became an increasingly
busy thoroughfare: omnibuses, causing congestion
at the corner of Church Street in 1831, were blamed
in 1833 by 28 residents for the depreciation of property, (fn. 86) and commercial interests prompted ambitious rebuilding, of which a noted example was the
White Lion with its courtyard north of the corner of
Harrow Road, a forerunner of the Metropolitan
Music Hall, in 1836. (fn. 87) Shops, small warehouses,
workshops, inns, and dining or coffee rooms lined
Edgware Road from Star Street to Church Street by
1845. Farther north-west, Devonshire Place and
Prospect Place stretched to Crompton Street; set
back from the road, they consisted mainly of private
residences, with a few schools or offices for professional men. The scene had changed little by 1863 but
the names of the terraces in Edgware Road were
abolished in 1868 and most of the houses north of
Church Street had been taken for shops by 1879.
There were also shops in Church Street and Hall
Place and, west of the green, in Harrow Road between Porteus Road and Fulham Place. (fn. 88)
The green itself, where old trees had to be felled
in 1849, (fn. 89) became less desirable. It drew disorderly
crowds in 1851 and was used for games in 1856,
prompting a petition for the paths to be railed in, to
which the vestry replied that it was empowered only
to preserve the green for general use, subject to the
lord's rights. (fn. 90) There were rival open-air preachers
and in 1861 a pedlar had set up a stall, 'to expose
offensive anatomical drawings'. (fn. 91) After 115 inhabitants had asked for the green to be enclosed for
recreation, as at Islington and Camberwell, the vestry agreed to do so in 1865, the burial ground being
taken over later. (fn. 92)
By the mid 19th century the old village centre was
hemmed in by Edgware Road to the east, by the
canal basin, considered the worst threat to Paddington's health, (fn. 93) amid industrial and working-class
premises to the south, and by the canal with the sidings and goods depot of the G.W.R. beyond it to the
west. (fn. 94) Only to the north was there an adjoining
middle-class area, where elegant villas survived along
the Regent's canal in Maida Hill West and northwest of the green in Howley Place and Park Place.
The large houses of Elm Tree Place and the northern
end of Hall Place, however, made way for tightly
packed terraces, presumably when the name Crompton Street was adopted in 1859. Terraces also filled
the new Hethpool, Campbell, Howell, and Cuthbert
streets, so named from 1858 and 1859. Adpar Street,
squeezed in between Hall Place and Edgware Road,
was named in 1878. Manor Place, facing the burial
ground and still mostly empty in 1869, was being
built up in 1885 (fn. 95) and had been lined with terraced
houses by 1901. Two new houses at the corner of
Church Street and the green were taken in 1883 for
a children's hospital, which was later extended. (fn. 96)
Housing was so dense that an iron church, St.
Philip's, was sited on part of the burial ground at the
northern end of Manor Place from c. 1861 until
1893. (fn. 97)
No longer the home of noted artists, the neighbourhood was better known in the 1870s for the song
'Polly Perkins of Paddington Green', published in
1863 and probably referring to Annette Perkins, who
may have lived in Albert (later Consort) Street, a
cul-de-sac off Harrow Road south of the green, and
who entered domestic service. (fn. 98) Also well known was
Ignatius Paul Pollaky (W. S. Gilbert's 'Paddington
Pollaky'), the first eminent private detective. Pollaky
(d. 1918) had an inquiry office at no. 13 Paddington
Green from 1865 until 1882 and lived in Maida Hill
West in 1865 and later in Portsdown Road. (fn. 99)
The last building spaces were taken in 1881, for a
board school in Campbell Street, (fn. 1) and in the 1890s,
when leases were made of a plot south of Porteus
Road for a drill hall and land west of the former
burial ground for St. David's Welsh church. (fn. 2) Many
houses in St. Mary's Terrace were leased in reversion by the Paddington Estate for rebuilding as
flats, (fn. 3) called St. Mary's Mansions. Since 1864 the
name St. Mary's Terrace had applied to the whole
of the road which had been called Park Place, except
to the more select Park Place Villas at the northern
end. (fn. 4) Three lodging houses were listed in St. Mary's
Terrace, 2 in Porteus Road, and 1 in Fulham Place
in 1879; the same roads had 15, 7, and 9 houses
offering 'apartments' by 1901. Park Place Villas,
Howley Place, and Maida Hill West had escaped
such a change, (fn. 5) although nos. 4 to 6 Maida Hill West
were to be demolished in 1902 and three blocks of
flats, called Stafford House, Douglas House, and
Aubrey House, replaced those and other villas at the
Edgware Road end of Maida Hill West between
1905 and 1910. (fn. 6)
No streets in the area were considered wealthy c.
1900, unlike many in Tyburnia and Bayswater.
Prosperous residents lived along Edgware Road, the
Regent's canal, St. Mary's Terrace, and Howley
Place, and fairly prosperous ones in Fulham Place,
Porteus Road, and near the green itself in Harrow
Road, Church Street, and Manor Place. The terraces
between Crompton and Cuthbert streets were classified as mixed, but there was poverty in parts of Hall
Place and adjoining cul-de-sacs, including Adpar
Street, and more in the alleys running from Harrow
Road to the canal basin. (fn. 7) In 1894-5 Kent's Place,
North Wharf Road, had 16 persons to a house,
making it the third most overcrowded street in
Paddington, and Church Place had 13.7 persons. (fn. 8)
Little further building took place until after the
Second World War. Social decline continued, with
many subdivided houses in Porteus Road having
deteriorated by 1937. (fn. 9) Two large houses in Howley
Place, nos. 8 and 20, were to be turned into furnished
apartments under 24-year leases in 1938. (fn. 10) The
borough council made its first major move towards
rehousing in 1937, when it acquired c. 50 houses in
Dudley Street, a cul-de-sac west of Hermitage Street
at the corner of Harrow and North Wharf roads.
Dudley House, a five-storeyed block of 50 flats for
232 people, was opened there in 1938. (fn. 11)
More extensive clearance was carried out from the
1950s, mostly among the dense streets north of the
green. North of Church Street, buildings in and
back from Edgware Road made way in 1954 for
Gilbert Sheldon House, where 40 families occupied
an eight-storeyed block of flats and a four-storeyed
block of maisonettes. (fn. 12) Immediately to the west between Hall Place and Manor Place, Paddington's
scheme for three blocks of fifteen storeys to be called
Perkins Heights was defeated by the L.C.C., which
secured the site for a technical college, finally opened
in 1967. (fn. 13) Plans by the borough council to extend
municipal building along Edgware Road from Gilbert Sheldon House to the Regent's canal (fn. 14) were
partially realized by Westminster L.B., which replaced the terraces between Crompton and Cuthbert
streets with the Hall Place estate. A small shopping
precinct and 146 dwellings, in maisonettes and a
tower block of twenty-one storeys, were finished by
1973. (fn. 15)
West of the green a four-storeyed range of flats,
Fleming Court, was built in the 1950s by the L.C.C.
at the corner of St. Mary's Terrace and St. Mary's
Square. A much larger municipal scheme replaced
most of the houses between St. Mary's Terrace and
Harrow Road with the yellow-brick blocks of John
Aird Court. The estate stretched north from Porteus
Road, which became a cul-de-sac, across Fulham
Place, which formed a residents' car park, to Howley
Place, leaving only the Warwick hotel in Harrow
Road as a Victorian survival. A later, private, scheme
created Hogan Mews, a cul-de-sac off the south side
of Porteus Road. (fn. 16)
South of the green, short terraces east of Hermitage Street made way for Sarah Siddons school,
opened in 1961-2, and for industrial rebuilding in
North Wharf Road. (fn. 17) The most striking change was
the construction in the mid 1960s of the flyover
across Edgware Road and its linking in 1970 with
the elevated Westway, which ran parallel to a widened and realigned Harrow Road along the southern
edge of Paddington green. Buildings at the junction
of Harrow and Edgware roads, including the Metropolitan Theatre of Varieties, were partly replaced by
the large Paddington green police station at the north
corner and the towering London Metropole hotel at
the south. The old town hall, police station, and
houses of Dudley Grove were also demolished, to
allow Harrow Road to pass closer to the church. (fn. 18)
The immediate neighbourhood of the church
forms a small outlying part of Maida Vale conservation area, to which houses along the Regent's canal
and around Howley Place also belong. (fn. 19) Modern
road building has reinforced the separation of Paddington green from the south part of the parish,
where Edgware Road, except near Praed Street, is
much more imposing and uniform than it is between
the flyover and Maida Vale. The stark new concrete
police station and yellow-brick blocks of Gilbert
Sheldon House contrast with many converted mid
19th-century houses, those of the old Devonshire
Terrace having shop fronts built over their gardens,
and with J. Turner & Son's former boot factory of
c. 1865 at the corner of Cuthbert Street. Similarly
the shopping parade and towers of Hall Place contrast with a late 19th-century red-brick range near
Maida Avenue.
Back from Edgware Road, overshadowed by tower
blocks and skirted by traffic lanes, some of them
sweeping upward to the flyover and Westway, the
open space around the refurbished church provides
an unexpected oasis. Plane trees shade the railed
paths of the green itself and a marble statue of Sarah
Siddons as the Tragic Muse, by Léon-Joseph
Chavalliaud, unveiled in 1897. (fn. 20) Other established
trees border the former burial ground, which, with
tombstones lined against its wall, stretches north to
a children's playground. A few tombs stand undisturbed, including that of Sarah Siddons beneath a
modern glass canopy. Some altered houses and a
yellow-brick pair belonging to the children's hospital are the only reminders that Paddington green
was a desirable place of residence in the earlier 19th
century.
West of the church, where St. Mary's Square has
been cut off from the realigned Harrow Road, a neoGeorgian vestry hall by Quinlan Terry (fn. 21) stands
slightly north of the site of the demolished town hall.
The east side of St. Mary's Terrace contains the 119
flats of St. Mary's Mansions, two blocks of five
storeys and basements in red brick with stone dressings, shielding two less imposing blocks which back
on the burial ground. The similar but slightly later
flats of Alexandra House and Osborne House stand
to the south. Beyond St. Mary's Mansions is a line
of older houses but on the west side of St. Mary's
Terrace only the refurbished nos. 1-21 (odd) survive
in that or neighbouring roads from the mid 19th
century. Farther north, facing John Aird Court along
the north side of Howley Place and where St. Mary's
Terrace gives way to Park Place Villas, are large
stuccoed houses of the earlier and mid 19th century.
Single or in pairs, well kept and in leafy gardens, they
have not shared the decline of the terraces closer to
Paddington green. Together with those at the west
end of Maida Avenue, they are among London's
'best examples of early Victorian domestic architecture.' In appearance and social standing they have
remained part of the area which came to be known as
Little Venice. (fn. 22)