Bayswater's literary connections

Bayswater is a London district to the north of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. The houses were mainly built in Regency and Victorian times to cater for some of the wealthier members of the community. There are long terraces of houses (in streets and garden squares) comprising three, four or five storeys which would originally have had kitchens in the basements and servants quarters in the attics. This is “Upstairs, Downstairs” territory!

Nowadays, many of the houses have been converted into hotels and apartments but they have maintained their overall elegance and this is still an expensive place to live.

It is a district that has attracted a disproportionately large number of literary figures, as well as being the setting for scenes in a number of novels. Some of Bayswater’s past residents are listed below:

The novelist and essayist Harriet Martineau (1802-76) lived for a short time in Westbourne Street, where, in 1849, she met Charlotte Brontë while the latter was in London to visit her publisher, whose office was also in Bayswater.

The novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63) lived for a short time in Albion Street.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) lived in Westbourne Park Villas from 1863 to 1867. This might sound like a posh address but it was at the “wrong” end of Bayswater, in that Hardy’s view was not of Hyde Park but the railway tracks leading to nearby Paddington Station!

Sir James Barrie (1860-1937) lived on Bayswater Road from 1902 to 1909. He had an excellent view of Hyde Park in which he took regular walks. It was on one of these that he met a mother with her young family of boys whom he befriended and told stories to, the end result being the play “Peter Pan” (1904).

Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), the biographer and critic who was a renowned member of the Bloomsbury Group, lived in Lancaster Gate between the ages of four and 29.

The novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) lived in Leinster Square from 1916 to 1929 and wrote “Pastors and Masters” and “Brothers and Sisters” while so doing.

Dame Edith Sitwell (1887-1964), poet and critic, lived in a shabby top-floor flat in Moscow Road for a short time from 1912, accompanied by her former governess. The unwanted attentions she bestowed on one of her guests, Wyndham Lewis, led to the latter lampooning her in his 1930 novel “The Apes of God”.

Bayswater also witnessed the birth and burial of noted novelists. Monica Dickens (1915-92), a great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens, was born in Chepstow Villas, while a former burial ground off Hyde Park Place was the resting place of both Laurence Sterne (1713-68) and Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823).

© John Welford