Leinster Gardens

Leinster Gardens is one of the most elegant streets in Bayswater, defined by its grand white Victorian mansions. While the row of houses appears uniform and prestigious, the structures at numbers 23 and 24 are entirely hollow. They consist of nothing more than five-foot-thick walls standing as a decorative shell. These false houses were constructed in the 1860s to hide an open-air gap created by the Metropolitan Railway, which was the world's first underground train line. The railway engineers needed an exposed section of track in this area to allow steam locomotives to vent smoke and condensation before entering the tunnels. To avoid an unsightly industrial scar in such an affluent neighborhood, the railway company built these facades to maintain the illusion of a continuous residential street.