A hymn to Bayswater
In Graham Greene’s 1935 short story, A Little Place Off The Edgware Road, a man – Craven – stalks the streets and picture houses of London’s Bayswater. His name is a double reference; to the cravenness of city life and to Craven Road, one of the area’s narrow, stuccoed streets. He is a marginal figure, inhabiting a liminal world. And so Bayswater remains – determinedly anonymous, transient and wonderful. If ever there was a short-order part of town, it is this.
Craven flirts with the idea of hiring a prostitute. You need money for love, he thinks. Bayswater’s connection with the sex trade has not lapsed. In the old days, punters would be entertained in the back of a van as it was driven around Hyde Park. You paid by the lap. Now university-age Russian girls skip out of scuffed German saloons with tired-looking drivers. In Ken Russell’s first film A House in Bayswater – a noir-ish documentary which seems to contain the germ of all his future work – one of the tenants shoots nudie pics on the roof. Stories of the area’s libertine past still abound. In the 1970s, Polish model Elizabeth ran a nightclub on Bayswater Road. On her birthday, the regulars would strip off their clothes, throw them down on the dancefloor, and set fire to them. She says that for all her years under Communism, she has never lived in a society as controlled as modern Britain.
In recent years, Bayswater’s Romanian presence has rocketed. Groups of young men from Wallachia and the Black Sea coast stand on Westbourne Grove late at night, smoking cigarettes in a wide circle. If you stop to chat, a spokesman appoints himself, discussing the opening of a Romanian restaurant just across the border in Notting Hill.
The survival of a hard frontier with this smarter neighbour is testament to Bayswater’s quiet traction. In pubs such as The Prince Edward and The Cleveland Arms, conversation still thrives. The Monkey Puzzle on Sussex Gardens is a favourite of sunburned West-Country visitors spilling from the main line at Paddington. Yet the firmest pillar of the area’s social life is the Tiroler Hut, an irresistibly kitsch Austrian restaurant which hasn’t changed its formula of lead-heavy food and schlager in fifty years. Octogenarian Croat regular Ivo has been propping up the bar and accepting donations of šljivovica for decades. When Brazilian street-sweeper Carlos has finished jiving along the pavement behind his Technicolor shades, he has a drink in the Tiroler Hut.
Around the corner lies Queensway, the neighbourhood’s uneasy artery. It was there that a Chinese restauranteur once cheerfully offered a ten-percent discount to a customer horrified by the presence on his plate of a deep-fried cockroach. At the mid-point of the street stands Whiteley’s shopping centre. Moored like a once-great ocean liner waiting for the breaker’s yard, it has become a forlorn throwback to the days before Amazon; complete with Union flags fluttering stoically in the breeze. At the top of Queensway sits the Porchester Baths, where the dank, green-tiled steam rooms present like something from an Alan Hollinghurst novel transposed to the Lubyanka.
It is a village of villages. The presence on Moscow Road of the Greek Orthodox cathedral has given rise to a small aggregation of Hellenic businesses. Like nearby St Petersburg Place, the street is named for the export destination of the gravel once quarried there. A second religious foundation, the Tyburn Convent, exists at Bayswater’s south-east corner. The order was founded to pray for the souls of Catholics martyred at the Triple Gallows of Tyburn, which stood on the present site of Marble Arch. You can now email the nuns a prayer-request.
Carried by the rip tide in London property, Bayswater’s housing market is in slow flux, with only the healthy crime-rate providing a brake. The tall terraces are cheaply built, containing high-ceilinged flats which are too cold in winter and too hot in summer. On Inverness Terrace, high-powered barristers rub shoulders with backpackers, and sweet smoke enwreathes the plane trees on a summer evening. In anticipation of eventual parity with Marylebone and Notting Hill, investors are buying up the neighbourhood’s old boarding houses and hotels, cashing out the previous cabal of Iraqi and Lebanese landlords.
But it is hard to imagine Bayswater ever fully sanitised. Like Kilburn or Chalk Farm, its ambiguous nature is too stubborn to be swept away by development. Perhaps W2 will finally take its place among the smart Central-London postcodes, and the slumbering twenty-year-old cars be replaced by a brusque new generation. But the lifeblood of cheap tourism will still oxygenate Queensway with tackiness, the world’s oldest trade still be plied, and the ghost of Craven always find a resting place.