Paddington – more than just a station

My previous experience of Paddington was simply as a place of transit, passing through to catch the westbound train to Devon. But I knew there was more to this historic area than Brunel’s steam age dreams and a cute Peruvian bear with a thing for marmalade sandwiches. Turning to my bookshelf I was surprised to find a chapter on Paddington in Discovering London Villages by John Wittich (pub 1976). The book contains chapters on the more traditional London villages: Hampstead, Chelsea, Highgate, Greenwich etc. Places people associate with the saying that London is a city of villages. But I’d never heard Paddington mentioned in the same way. How wrong I was. Or it could be that John Wittich lived in St. Michael’s Street, Paddington, as I discovered via the YouTube comments on the video.

Another unlikely source of commentary came from Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody Knows (pub 1962), also a former Paddington resident. I always associate Fletcher with Islington, Clerkenwell and Camden and those streets around the Inns of Court. However Fletcher was enthusiastic about the charms of Paddington writing that, “I claim to write on it with authority, since I tramped nearly every inch of it when I lived in Gloucester Place and that reminds me of a characteristic London feature, the quick transition from a well-off to a seedy area at the drop of a hat. A single street becomes a sort of Mason-Dixon line of demarcation. You could spend a lifetime nosing round Paddington, and still make discoveries.”

Fletcher paints a vivid scene, as well as one of his characteristic illustrations, of neighbourhood life around Star Street, Paddington. And despite the book being published in 1962, you can still feel the vibe that he described over sixty years ago. The plant pots are still on the windowsills as well.
It was Fletcher who guided me from St. Mary’s Churchyard and Paddington Green with its Cold War concrete Civil Defence Report and Control Centre to Church Street Market on the other side of Edgware Road where he once picked up an early Turner drawing for a fiver. An antiques market lined the street. You could browse the scattered buffet of furniture, rugs, artworks, and bric-a-brac at leisure free from the crush of Portobello Market. It’s a real gem. Although I didn’t find any bargain art treasures like Fletcher claims to have done.

I crossed over Edgware Road, back following John Wittich’s Paddington trail, particularly interested in the burial ground where Laurence Sterne had been buried, dug up by grave robbers, then re-buried. Wittich didn’t name the graveyard but someone posted the information about St George’s Fields in the comments, now a ziggurat style housing block but retaining some of the burial grounds and portions of the high double walls placed there to prevent resurrectionists lobbing corpses over.

The walk had to end at the site of the Tyburn Tree after a visit to the Tyburn Shrine – an analogue of Paris’ Mount of Martyrs (Montmartre) at the Hill of Martyrs (Tyburn). Although a tree may well have been the original site of execution, the Tyburn Tree was a terrifying gallows that could hang twenty-four people at a time. A truly grim marker in the London landscape.