The peculiar truth behind 23-24 Leinster Gardens

It is easy to get lost in Bayswater. The imposing bulk of tall, elegant Victorian terraces loom over anyone at street level, a clumsy grid system affording visitors little sense of bearing among the near-identical, whitewashed mansions.

You would be forgiven then for breezing down Leinster Gardens without studying its addresses, sure that Kensington Gardens was this way. But look a little closer and all is not as it seems.

Numbers 23 and 24 are a lie. Wedged between two hotels on the street’s western side, they have the same bold, ionic column-sided front doors, the same balustraded balconies and sash windows, the same positions of prestige on Historic England’s listed register, but there is nothing more.

The front doors do not and cannot open, and if they did it would reveal only a hidden void above railway tracks, and possibly a passing District line train.

23-24 Leinster Gardens haven’t always been a ruse. They were once real houses, part of the same mid-Victorian building, but fell victim to the construction of the Metropolitan Line - London’s first underground railway - which was built to pass under the address (the tracks are today used by the District and Circle lines).

With trains at this point in time running on steam rather than electricity, leaving urban keyholes to ventilate the tunnels was an important engineering feature - and more exist across the city. But in this monied part of west London, a gaping hole would have been a blight on an otherwise pristine street scene. And so, in the 1860s, 23 and 24 were knocked down and a dummy facade, linking numbers 22 and 25, built in their place.

The five-foot front is managed by Transport for London and bears a remarkable semblance to its neighbours, boasting 18 greyed-out windows and two chunky doors with no letterboxes.

But don’t take my word for it. Head south from the address and take the first right then right again onto Porchester Terrace and all will be revealed. The rear of the facade certainly has a different character to its customer-facing colleague, a blank, grey wall interrupting the buildings on either side, propped up by six metal beams. On tip-toes it is possible to see the railway line below and imagine a 19th-century steam engine bellowing smoke into the Bayswater sky.

The dummy facades are by no means common and have accordingly played their part in history. Andrew Martin, in his book Underground, Overground: A Passenger’s History of the Tube, explains how many saw in 23-24 Leinster Gardens great potential for high jinks. “So began 150 years of practical jokes,” he wrote, “with coal merchants sending young apprentices to deliver coal to the facades, or letters addressed to Mr N O Body, 24 Leinster Gardens.”

It is said that in the Thirties, a hoaxster made a pretty penny selling tickets to a charity ball at the address only for guests to arrive to discover that not only did the party not exist but nor did its venue.

Martin also reveals how few people know about the facade, including its adjacent hotels, the Blakemore and Henry VIII. “I walked into the Blakemore and volunteered my sympathy to the duty manager for the way he must be constantly pestered with questions about the pretend houses next door,” he wrote. “‘Ah yes,’ he said, and smiled vaguely for a while before adding, ‘what do you mean?’”

“I then went into the Henry VIII and had the same conversation with the duty manager there. Within 10 minutes, staff members from each hotel were standing in front of numbers 23 and 24 and saying to each other, ‘But we thought they were part of your hotel.’”

More recent roles include an appearance in the BBC series Sherlock in 2014, while indie rockers Johnny Foreigner reference the facade in their 2014 song, "In Capitals", musing: “There is no hidden door at Leinster Gardens.”

While there are no similar examples of architectural vanity in London, across the Pond in New York City, 58 Joralemon Street acts as a front for a subway vent, but it has nothing of the mystery and character of 23-24 Leinster Gardens.

In his book, Martin says that on squinting through one of the real panes of glass on the ground floor of the address, he could see “a tiny booth-like room”. He asked Transport for London what this was for.

“A spokesman said he’d come back to me, which he eventually did. ‘Nobody knows,’ he said.”