LEINSTER GARDENS, off Bayswater Road, is a routine elegant mid-Victorian terraced street. Walk down it and, as you pass numbers 23-24 on the left, glance up at the windows: you’ll see they’re painted black.
That’s because these houses were demolished in the 1860s to make way for the Metropolitan Railway, which runs perpendicular to the road in a cutting directly behind. Rather than leave a gap-toothed hole in the street, the developers built a five-foot-thick facade which exactly matched the houses on either side.
Photo courtesy of Diamond Geezer on Flickr
