High Street Kensington Tube Station

Welcome to High Street Kensington... one of London's most storied streets, and a place where shopping, royalty, and sheer audacity have collided for over a hundred and fifty years. As you step out of the station, take a look around you.

London · from the walk “Kensington High Street: Shop, Eat & Explore”

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High Street Kensington Underground Station, Kensington High Street, London W8 4PT

Welcome to High Street Kensington... one of London's most storied streets, and a place where shopping, royalty, and sheer audacity have collided for over a hundred and fifty years.

As you step out of the station, take a look around you. The entrance sits inside Kensington Arcade, which was built between nineteen oh six and nineteen oh seven as part of the station's redevelopment, designed by architect George Campbell Sherrin. And here's the clever bit... the space in that arcade was taken by two neighbouring department stores, Pontings and Derry and Toms. That's right. You could step off the train and walk straight into the shops without ever seeing daylight. A handbill from nineteen oh nine boasted that visitors could enjoy "comfortable and rapid travel by electric trains" and emerge "under cover all the way" — dry and unruffled on the wettest London day.

Now, glance at the lampposts along the street. Do you notice anything unusual on top? Even some of the lampposts here are topped by a crown — a quiet reminder that you're standing in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, with Kensington Palace just a short walk away.

But the Real secret of this street lies a few minutes down the road... six storeys above your head. The Roof Gardens sit a hundred feet above Kensington High Street on top of the former Derry and Toms building. Over a two-year period, Welsh landscape architect Ralph Hancock planted more than five hundred species of plants across one and a half acres. That's a Spanish garden, a Tudor garden, and an English woodland... complete with a flowing stream, full-grown trees, and — wait for it — Flamingos! Four flamingos called Bill, Ben, Splosh and Pecks have called this rooftop home.

During the Second World War, the gardens survived Two German bombs. The first hit the Spanish Garden in nineteen forty, destroying its clock tower and falling down a staircase to the fourth floor, where it exploded. The second came in nineteen forty one... a large parachute bomb that landed on the tea pavilion but — miraculously — failed to explode.

And those celebrity guest books from the war years? They contain signatures from Queen Mary, King Haakon of Norway, and actors like John Gielgud and Leslie Howard.

Before you head off to explore the shops and restaurants of this magnificent street... take one more look at this arcade around you. It's one of the last surviving fragments of Pontings department store — the only remaining part of the original building. Everything else was demolished in the late nineteen seventies. But here, in this passageway, a ghost of Kensington's golden age of shopping still lingers.

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