Lancaster Gate, Westminster
A street, locality and entrance to Kensington Gardens located halfway along Bayswater Road
Lancaster Gate is an entrance to Kensington Gardens
The entrance to Kensington Gardens, which gave the locality and station their names, is so called in honour of Queen Victoria, in her guise as the Duchess of Lancaster. Lancaster Gate station is actually sited opposite Marlborough Gate, just to the east.
In its heyday, Lancaster Gate’s Christ Church was nicknamed ‘the thousand pound church’ because of the large sums collected from the wealthy Bayswater congregation every Sunday. Dry rot led to the demolition of the body of the church in 1978 and the spire now finds itself attached to an ecclesiastical-looking block of flats.
Lancaster Gate is Britain’s most densely populated ward, with almost 100 persons per acre. The ward has a high proportion of young, well-educated, single residents living alone in privately rented accommodation. There are very few families with children or households with more than one pensioner.
Lytton Strachey, the eminent biographer, spent 25 years at 69 Lancaster Gate, while JM Barrie lived around the corner at 100 Bayswater Road.
For over seventy years Lancaster Gate was the home of the Football Association, the governing body of English football. The FA relocated to Soho Square in 2000, selling its old building to property developers for £7¼ million, and moved again in 2009, to Wembley Stadium.
