Leinster Gardens House Facades

You are standing before what appears to be a perfectly ordinary pair of grand Victorian townhouses. Numbers 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens blend seamlessly into the ornate terrace, featuring the same classical stucco, elegant balconies, and imposing proportions as their neighbors. However, these structures are a grand architectural illusion, measuring only five feet deep and containing no rooms, staircases, or inhabitants. They are essentially a thin, carefully crafted screen built in the 1860s to mask an unsightly open gap in the streetscape created by the construction of London's first underground railway.