page_title: Craven Hill Gardens
section_title: Location and history
hierarchical_section_title: Craven Hill Gardens / Location and history
caption_attribution_description: Descriptive map of London poverty, 1889 (north - western sheet) General Collections Keywords: LABOUR; Poverty; Maps; London; Charles Booth
context_page_description: Craven Hill Gardens is a classical, Victorian, residential garden estate which has two small garden squares, the green subset of squares in London. It is in Bayswater, in its Lancaster Gate neighbourhood, south-west of contemporary Paddington of which those districts were once part. It is made up of four rows of residential buildings lining its three streets, and eastern returns, between 160 and 250 metres north of Hyde Park. The western return of this street configuration is partly Leinster Gardens and partly named Leinster Terrace.
  Numbers 13–23, the higher numbers of Craven Hill – a continuation street – face its larger private garden, one block of which is a listed building. A 1960s block known as Corringham forms its second architecturally exceptional building and has a large private garden, the secondary garden. Both gardens have trees surrounding. The estate was a semi-rural possession of the Lords Craven in the 18th century.
context_section_description: In fields west of the hamlet Bayswater (or Bayard's watering place as a text of 1380 first records) were the buildings of Upton farm, a few hundred yards back from the highway to Oxford at the end of a tree-lined lane, which William Craven, 3rd Baron Craven bought in 1733.  In 1746 two buildings stood near the road east of the Bayswater rivulet and three on the west side.  The lane still led through fields, to Lord Craven's early pest house, east of which were two more buildings, presumably barns, beside the rivulet.  The farm in 1742 was 'intended to be called Craven Hill'.  Dwellings had replaced the pest house here, where publisher Edward Orme of Bond Street bought the lease of a house in 1811. Artistic and literary figures were attracted to a district which was then semi-rural. In 1834, poet Sarah Flower Adams (1805-48), moved with her husband to 5 Craven Hill, where they were soon followed by the author and politician William Johnson Fox (1786-1864) and his housekeeper the composer Eliza Flower.
  By 1889, the wealthy southern newly made parish, Bayswater, was among an unbroken string of gold-coloured neighbourhoods by Hyde Park — documented in Booth's poverty map as socially distinct from the generally low-to-mid income central, neighbouring heartland, of what was left of Paddington.  Lancaster Gate East and West wards one of which contains the area, created in 1901, had initially 2.15 per cent and 2.58 of their inhabitants overcrowded, compared with 32.76 per cent in Church ward around Paddington Green.
  In 1965 a change took place in the local authority (borough) of Craven Hill Gardens: the City of Westminster engulfed the Metropolitan Borough of Paddington, an identical area to the ancient parish of Paddington that included and was, historically, the description of the area.
caption: Charles Booth (social reformer)'s poverty map, 1889. The gold-coloured wealth of the south-western Lancaster Gate wards is apparent.
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