Escorts in Gloucester Road, SW7: who is close, and how soon
On a winter evening the daylight has left Gloucester Road by half past four, and the white terraces begin to glow under the street lamps before most offices have emptied. This is the hour to see the district properly. Stucco was made for lamplight: the cream fronts, the pillared porches and the long level cornices of the Cromwell Road read more clearly at dusk than at noon, while the red brick gables a few streets south turn almost black against the sky.
This page is about what to look at on the way in, whether the walk is from the station to a flat or back to a hotel after dinner, and Gloucester Road escorts come in by the same streets. None of the board lives on this stretch; the nearest three are in South Kensington, and even so the office quotes about an hour from its confirmation to her arrival, a little longer in the rush, then sends the precise time in the chat, with the lengths all set out on the rates.
On the ground
Gloucester Road in practice
Landmarks on the arrival slip
By postcode, never by nameSW7 4LH, SW7 4QH, SW7 5AG, SW7 3ER.
Nearest stations
Walking timeGloucester Road, 1 minute. South Kensington, 6 minutes. High Street Kensington, 10 minutes.
Getting there
SW7Travel is included across Zones 1 and 2, and counted from the moment the hour is set rather than from when she leaves.
On the board
Nearest prints to Gloucester Road
Who works here
On the board in Gloucester Road
The eight prints above are a first shortlist for Gloucester Road tonight. Any of the twenty eight on the who is free page can be asked for by name instead.
Note 02
Two station fronts, nearly forty years apart
Gloucester Road station has two buildings side by side, and together they are a small lesson in how London's railways grew. The older one dates from 1868, when the first underground lines were pushed west into the new streets of Kensington. Beside it stands the Piccadilly line's front of 1906, faced in the deep ox-blood glazed tiles that mark that line's original stations all over London, with wide arched windows on its upper floor.
Below, the older platforms lie in an open cutting under the sky, so a traveller arriving by train sees brick retaining walls and daylight rather than tunnel. One disused platform has for years been given over to art, which makes the wait for a train one of the stranger galleries in the city.
Note 03
Stucco by the street
Most of what you walk past was built between the 1850s and the 1870s, in the building rush that followed the Great Exhibition, and it keeps to one pattern: four or five storeys of cream-painted stucco, a pillared porch to each door, a balcony running the width of the first floor and a garden square behind railings. Courtfield Gardens and Cornwall Gardens show the pattern at its most complete, their tall fronts facing inwards on lawns and plane trees.
The Cromwell Road is the same idea at the scale of a main road, terraces running on block after block with barely a break. At night the porches are lit one after another, and in these streets the house number is often painted on the porch column rather than fixed to the door, which is worth knowing when you are looking for one.
Note 04
The red brick interruption
South of the Cromwell Road, Harrington Gardens and Collingham Gardens break the stucco completely. In the 1880s the architects Ernest George and Harold Peto built houses here in red brick and terracotta, with tall stepped and curved gables borrowed from the merchants' houses of Holland and Flanders, and hardly two fronts are alike. Terracotta panels, moulded brick and small-paned windows fill the fronts, and the rooflines step up and down along the street instead of running level as the stucco does.
The best known of them was built for W. S. Gilbert, who wrote the words for Arthur Sullivan's operas, at 39 Harrington Gardens. Walk these two streets after dark and the gables stand up against the sky like a quay in Antwerp that has wandered into west London.
Note 05
A Gothic church and a cobbled mews
St Stephen's, on the corner of Gloucester Road and Southwell Gardens, is a Victorian Gothic church of the 1860s, and its most famous parishioner was the poet T. S. Eliot, churchwarden there for a quarter of a century. Its pointed Gothic windows make a rare break in the road's run of shopfronts and porches.
North of the Cromwell Road the grand streets keep their back lanes, and Kynance Mews is the prettiest of them: cobbles, painted doors and climbing plants on the old coach houses and stables that once served the terraces in front. The road's own name comes from a house long gone, Gloucester Lodge, built for Maria, Duchess of Gloucester, on what had been Hogmore Lane.
Note 06
Reading the street on the way in
After dark the architecture does the navigating. A lit porch with its number on the column, a gable against the sky, the ox-blood station front at the top of the road: these are the markers anyone steers by here, escorts in Gloucester Road included, and the ones worth mentioning when you send an address that is hard to find. For a mansion block, the name carved over the entrance matters as much as the street number.
Each neighbour has its own look. South Kensington begins where the stucco meets the museums to the east, the squares of Earls Court take over to the south west, and High Street Kensington lies north beyond the mews.
From The Roundup
Two notes worth reading for Gloucester Road
Asked most often
Gloucester Road, asked and answered
Why is the house number painted on the pillar?
Which streets have the Dutch-looking gables?
What is the tiled red building at the station?
Is St Stephen's the church where T. S. Eliot was churchwarden?
Where are the cobbled mews?
One zone either way
Next along from Gloucester Road
Last strip
Say a name and an hour
Write in with a length, a time and the zone you are staying in, and a name from the board comes back with a window attached. That is the whole of the arrangement.