(pictured: PLP's 'Park Modern' overlooking Hyde Park) Bayswater’ was ‘Bayard’s Watering Place’, for horses, where the Oxford Road from London, along the north side of Hyde Park, bridged the Westbourne Brook. It has been, at times, seedy, shabby, and in places, slummy. It's isolated, on the ‘wrong side of the park’\*, and outclassed by its neighbours, posh Tyburnia and trendy Notting Hill. Today's Bayswater is the outcome of rapid, disorganised development by builder-speculators, without a master plan: a ‘furious crescendo’, ‘borrowing Nash’s stucco uniform’\*\* of residential terraces in the years leading up to WW1. Summerson says: ‘after 1850 it is rare to find any architect of good reputation designing estates’. In 1868 a steamy, smoky railway was driven through it, and after WW2 multiple streets of damaged houses on the north side were demolished to build the Tecton’s Hallfield Estate, containing 656 flats for 2,362 people. Its biggest thing was Whiteley’s Department Store, in Queensway, once equal to Selfridges or Harrods, closed in 1981, replaced by a mall in 1989, and finally by the ‘Six Senses Hotel’ last year. That was the end of its role as a shopping destination. Now Bayswater is ‘undergoing an exhilarating transformation’, ‘evolving into a vibrant new destination for London', ‘delivering highly innovative, world-class architectural projects that blend state-of-the-art engineering with historic conservation.’\*\*\* So we’re going to meet at Paddington Square, possibly London's best example of sheer unadulterated modernism, soaring above the Bakerloo Line Station at Paddington, then use the boulevards of Tyburnia, the dual-carriageways of their day, to reach Gloucester Terrace: 800m of straight, level, complete, continuous terraces, forming the boundary of Bayswater. As we turn in to Craven Road, the first thing you’ll notice is the sudden, precipitous fall in level, in the mews entrances on either side. In fact, we are walking directly above the subterrane

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