Kensington Gravel Pits

The area you are walking through was once a rural hamlet defined by a rugged industrial landscape. For over three centuries, massive pits here provided the gravel and brick earth used to construct many of the buildings in London's West End. These quarries were so productive that they transformed the local geography into a series of deep, raw excavations along the old road to Oxford. By the early nineteenth century, the scale of this extraction was so significant that the location was formally known as Kensington Gravel Pits, a name that stuck until the late Victorian era.