MEPO 4/349/154 

  • George Brooks, warrant number 97540. Joined on 29 Nov 1909, and left on 2 Dec 1934. Last posted to X Division as a PS.

16 November 1922 was a Thursday. and the wedding of my Grandparents at St. Marks, Regent Park. London.There are no wedding photos as Mema refused to have any taken. Though it was not really that fashionable to have phots and a big wedding then. They probably went back to their house 114 Gloucester road and had sandwiches.


From the early 17th century this was Hogs Moor or Hogmire Lane and it was the site of an ultimately unsuccessful pleasure garden (and for a while a pick-your-own fruit and flower farm) in the late 18th century. At that time most of the vicinity was filled with nurseries and market gardens.

George III’s sister-in law Maria, Duchess of Gloucester built herself a house called Villa Maria (later Orford Lodge) on part of the pleasure garden’s site in 1805, and she died there two years later. The politician George Canning bought the property in 1809 and retained it until 1825. The house (latterly called Gloucester Lodge) stood in extensive grounds close to what is now the south-east corner of Gloucester Road’s junction with Cromwell Road.

Much of the surrounding area was built up in the second quarter of the 19th century or soon afterwards. The more significant projects included:

  • To the south-east, the modest Lee estate of 1825 (including the well-preserved properties at 135 and 137 Gloucester Road – shown on the left of the photograph below)
  • To the north-west, Kensington New Town between 1837 and 1843 (including numbers 2 to 32 Gloucester Road and the Gloucester Arms at No.34, all now grade II listed)
  • To the south-west, Hereford Square in the mid-1840s
  • To the north-east, Kensington Gate (originally called Gloucester Square) from 1850

Gloucester Road - Hereford Cottage and Lodge

Gloucester Lodge was demolished shortly after 1851, by which time almost everyone had stopped calling the thoroughfare Hogmire Lane and started calling it Gloucester Road – as had been suggested by the Kensington Turnpike Trustees soon after the duchess had died.

From 1862 two developer-builders began laying out Cornwall Gardens on land that had belonged to members of the Broadwood piano-making family since the start of the century. The street was named in honour of the Prince of Wales (also Duke of Cornwall), who came of age in November 1862. Cornwall Gardens quickly became popular with high-ranking administrators, lawyers and soldiers, especially those who had recently returned from colonial duties in India. Kynance Place and Mews were created at the same time, originally as St George’s Place and Cornwall Mews.

Palace Gate was also laid out in the 1860s, forking left at the north end of Gloucester Road, which had hitherto forked right and continued up to Kensington Road.

Some grand Italianate terraces were built on Gloucester Road itself during this period. They were later converted to flats or hotels, or replaced by mansion blocks or rows of shops with flats above.

The cosy, ornate church of St Stephen was consecrated in 1867. In the following year the Metropolitan Railway opened a branch line from Edgware Road to Brompton (Gloucester Road), as the station was originally called. John Fowler was the station’s (highly paid) engineer and architect. District Railway trains also began serving Brompton a few months after it had opened.

Part of Kensington’s Alexander estate, the west-central section of Gloucester Road and its hinterland began to fill with high-class housing as soon as developers knew the railway was coming. From an early stage, it was intended to build a substantial hotel on the south corner of Gloucester Road and Courtfield Road. The entrepreneurial son of a Norfolk farmer, James Bailey soon became involved in the project and the main part of his hotel was completed in 1876, though it was subsequently extended in several stages.

Designed by Leslie Green, Gloucester Road Piccadilly line station opened in 1906, next door to the original station on the corner of Courtfield Road. (See Wikipedia’s article for a full account of the station’s complicated history.)

Kensington New Town’s St George’s Terrace was demolished in 1907 and replaced by St George’s Court (42–72 Gloucester Road), which has shops at street level and flamboyant redbrick and flats above, with stone dressings. The architect was Paul Hoffman, who was responsible for several large commercial and residential blocks in Kensington and the West End. Incompatibly, the Survey of London (ed. Hermione Hobhouse) calls St George’s Court ‘dowdy’ while The Buildings of England (ed. Nikolaus Pevsner) calls it ‘jubilant’.

Hidden London: Bailey’s Hotel, Courtfield Road
Bailey’s Hotel, Courtfield Road

Sections of Gloucester Road were redeveloped at regular intervals after the Second World War, beginning with the replacement of bomb-damaged properties. This has resulted in some architectural inconsistency, especially among the houses towards the southern end of the road.

In the early 1970s Bailey’s Hotel was threatened with demolition, which the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea creditably resisted. The Bailey’s Hotel, as it now pretentiously called, is presently operated by Millennium Hotels.

In 1989 a large shopping and office complex was built behind Gloucester Road station, spanning the District and Circle line tracks. As part of the development, the twin stations were remodelled internally to share a single entrance, which is shown in the photo at the top.* The redundant Piccadilly line station building was divided into retail units.

In addition to its hotels, Gloucester Road has many short-stay apartments and studio flats, while a plentiful supply of bars and cafés caters to both tourists and residents. The locality’s best-known restaurant is probably the Bombay Brasserie, which opened in 1982 in a corner of Bailey’s Hotel that had once been the site of its stables.

Long-term residents of Gloucester Road and its neighbouring streets tend to be affluent and in good health. Many are employed in financial and insurance activities, often working long hours. Like other parts of Kensington, demographic data for this locality bears little resemblance to the picture for London as a whole. To take one example from the 2011 census, non-British residents were more likely to have been born in France or the United States than any other country.

The author JM Barrie lived at 133 Gloucester Road between 1895 and 1902, the period in which he conceived the story of Peter Pan.

In his Literary Guide to London, Ed Glinert calls TS Eliot ‘the Pope of Gloucester Road’ in an allusion to the poet’s 25 years as warden of St Stephen’s church. Eliot lived in nearby Grenville Place from 1933 to 1940.

Postal district: SW7
Station: Circle, District and Piccadilly lines (zone 1)
Photographic archive: Gloucester Road – gateway to London (RBKC library: time machine blog post)
* The picture of Gloucester Road station at the top of this page is adapted from an original photograph, copyright La Citta Vita, at Flickr, made available under the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic licence. Any subsequent reuse is freely permitted under the terms of that licence.

No. 114 Gloucester Road

The first house built on the estate was to the south of St. Stephen's Church, No. 114 (formerly No. 74) Gloucester Road, erected for George Berkley, a civil engineer, by Higgs and Hill to the design of the architect H. E. Harwood. Tenders were sought in July 1870, Higgs's being for £4,484, and a ninety-year lease from 1870 was granted in August 1872. (fn. 14) It is a large house of slightly asymmetrical villa form with a stucco front on three storeys. Berkley also took land for building a stable in Lenthall Mews on the north flank of Gloucester Road Station in October 1872. (fn.


 15) From 1875 Edward James Reed, naval engineer and M.P., lived here in succession to Berkley.

 (fn. 16)Before the success of Barrie’s Peter Pan play he enjoyed another stage sensation in London and New York with a play called Quality Street. And yes, they did name the famous tins of chocolates after the play. More of that later, but first, a sort of apology. I was a bit unkind to Barrie’s creation Peter Pan in this post last year. The problem was that Arthur Rackham’s illustrations for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens are very much better than the text itself.

The apology to Barrie is due because unfortunately the same is true of Quality Street. Hugh Thomson’s illustrations are much more enjoyable than the actual story.


During the course of collecting the images for this post I read most of Quality Street and while I still hold to the view that the pictures are the most interesting thing about it, I did warm to some of the dialogue after a while (although the story is  still quite silly and Barrie’s stage directions sound like he’s writing a DVD commentary). If I had been around in London at the time I might have gone to see it, as many others did. It was a good boost to Barrie’s career.

Quality Street was an innovative product first sold in 1936. The company invented a device to wrap the sweets in coloured paper and conceived the idea of putting them into a tin . This made the product cheaper than boxes of chocolates with individally wrapped sweets. Harold Mackintosh combined aspiration with nostalgia by naming his product after the play. Some readers may remember that the tins used to feature a pair of characters know in the trade as Miss Sweetly and Major Quality who were always depicted in a vaguely Regency / mid-Victorian setting probably suggested by Thomson’s pictures. As I recall there were TV commercials featuring the two as well, especially at Christmas where they merged with the general 19th century Dickensian season of bonnets and crinolines. 

.The recent post about Hugh Thomson’s illustrations to J M Barrie’s play Quality Street attracted quite a bit of attention in an otherwise quiet month so I was happy to take up an offer to do the same with Barrie’s other play of 1901/02, The Admirable Crichton. This was one I had heard of, thanks to the 1957 film version starring Kenneth More, seen many years ago on one of those Sunday afternoons of childhood when you’d watch anything that was on. The final scene has remained in my memory, but no spoilers yet.

1901 had been a good year for Barrie. Quality Street opened in New York and he finished Crichton while he was attending rehearsals for Quality Street. Within a short space of time he had two plays on the London stage. He and his wife were in the process of moving out of their Gloucester Road house to another house in Leinster Gardens, Bayswater which was close to Kensington Gardens, a favourite haunt of both of them.

Crichton is an odd sort of story. It was described as “a fantasy in four acts” but it is also a satire or maybr even some kind of parable about the rigidly stratified structure of Edwardian society. It begins with a portrait of an aristocratic household with the mildly eccentric Lord Loam, his three daughters and Crichton the butler a man who knows his place and wishes everyone else would stay in theirs

Camden town

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The north London district first visited by Walter Sickert in 1888 to sketch at the Old Bedford music hall, and which in 1911 would lend its name to the Camden Town Group, was then a little over a century old. Until 1780 it had been only a wayside hamlet at the fork where the roads northward to Hampstead and Highgate diverged, known as the ‘village of Mother Red Cap’ after its best-known public house. ‘Ribbon development’ had begun along the main road (today’s High Street), the boundary between the estate of Lord Southampton to the west and, on the east side, that of Earl Camden, to whom the whole area owes it name. Started in greater earnest in 1791, the development of their fields on either side of the main road was gradual, and it was not until c.1850 that all the core parts of the new ‘town’ were fully built up.
Early Camden Town had been a quiet, middle-class, residential suburb. To encourage inhabitants of the ‘right class’, an imposing neoclassical chapel-of-ease, the Camden Chapel, was erected in Camden Street and consecrated in 1824.
By Sickert’s day, Camden Town had evolved into a crowded inner-London suburb with a very mixed character. The Regent’s Canal, whose banks would in due course be lined by warehouses and factories, was opened to traffic in 1820. In 1837 the London & Birmingham Railway cut through the fields to the west en route to Euston, separating the embryonic suburb, both physically and psychologically, from upper class Regent’s Park, to which it had originally aspired to belong. Opened in 1850 was a second railway, the North London, bestriding the district’s northern edge on a brick viaduct and bringing with it further smoke and noise.1
Although Booth’s notes about Camden Town are peppered with expressions such as ‘going downhill’, a surprising number of streets are still coded red (for ‘middle-class, well-to-do’). These include the High Street and its offshoot Park Street (now Parkway), whose shopkeepers were widely regarded as the most well-off inhabitants. Likewise shown as ‘middle-class’ are the area’s westerly streets near to Regent’s Park, such as Gloucester Crescent, where Sickert lived at number 68 in 1912. Just around the corner, at 11 Oval Road, was the childhood home and probable birthplace in 1869 of Walter Bayes, who, unlike other Camden Town Group members, could thus claim a lifelong connection with the district
Staging plays and hosting public meetings was the Royal Park Hall in Park Street, successor to the Park Theatre which had burned down in 1881.20 Also opened in 1900 at the south end of the High Street was the imposing Royal Camden Theatre,21 which by 1909 had become a variety theatre, the Camden Hippodrome, and by 1913 a cinema. In Delancey Street, a former public hall turned ‘billiards lounge’ became a roller-skating rink in 1903, capitalising on the popular craze of the day, and then in 1908 the Fan cinema. Further picture houses opened soon after.22
Highly popular were the St Pancras Baths & Washhouse in King Street, which offered two swimming pools, besides meeting the laundry needs of the many locals with inadequate washing facilities at home. Although for outdoor activities there was virtually no open space in Camden Town itself, the inhabitants at least had Regent’s Park (with its Zoo) on their doorstep.

































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