Houses near the London Underground - part two

Leinster Gardens on TV

Speaking of houses near London Underground tracks, in May, Geoff blogged the following popular tube fact/bit of geeky tube trivia:

"in many a tube-history book, I always kept reading about where the District & Circle line has been built in-between Bayswater & Paddington, there had been a cutting made underneath some houses, and during construction, two houses had been taken down to allow the cut & cover tunnel to be built beneath, and to this day - a false house front had been put back in its place so as to disguise it.

"The houses in question are at numbers 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens, in the cute back streets of Bayswater, but having made all the effort to go there to get a photo of it - it's quite disappointing.

"I think I was having visions of being able to look through a crack or gap and see down onto the tracks, but instead everything is sealed nicely and painted over."

Well thanks to Jon Justice, I learnt that TV historian and general annoying know all, Adam Hart Davies, went to do exactly the same thing as Geoff as part of the "How London Was Built" TV series. In episode 5, we see him going up to the false front doors at Leinster Gardens, or as Jon says with the screen grabs he sent me "AHD (God, I hope his middle name is David) being baffled by a fake door. "But there's no door handle! Mummy, I'm scared."



Also like Geoff, AHD went round a corner to see if there was any more signs of the trains. Geoff said "as I was passing this innocuous looking wall here, I heard the distinctive rattle of a C-stock type train from somewhere down below." Geoff is 6 foot 3 so managed to peep over the wall and get a picture of the train going past.

Here we see AHD leaning over a similar wall spotting a train or as Jon says: "AHD demonstrating the skills for which his is justly famous: Looking like Rolf Harris, wearing god-awful shirts that make his children hate him and pretend they don't know him and pointing in a rather limp-wristed, camp manner"



And here's what he saw:



The series was on ITV1 and finished last week, but if you have The History Channel in the UK - check out the Tunnels and Trains episode - this will be repeated from September 29th - October 2nd and focusses on the history of tunnelling in the capital including Marc Kingdom Brunel's Rotherhithe Tunnel Project.

London Underground; Tube Posted by annie mole Sunday, September 11, 2005 Permalink COMMENT HERE
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