Aldridge Road Villas is a surviving fragment of mid-Victorian residential development.
The Aldridge family held land beside the Harrow Road at Westbourne Park by 1743. John Aldridge, who died in 1795 and was MP for Queensborough, married a wealthy widow, Henrietta Busby. She was a considerable Bayswater landowner and added several scattered fields in Bayswater and Westbourne to John Aldridge’s possessions.
The street’s nineteenth century heart is bounded on three sides by post 1970s housing and with its western side forming part of the boundary between Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea.
Aldridge Road Villas contains a mixture of mid-Victorian semi-detached villas with stuccoed Ionic and Corinthian porches and bays, heavily architraved upper floor windows, and broad over-hanging caves. These are adjacent to groups of brick and stucco mid/late-Victorian terraces, some with elaborate dentilled cornices, semi-circular architraved windows and stuccoed, canted bay windows at ground and first floors.
Situated on the north-east edge of the area is Westbourne Park station and ‘The Metropolitan’ Public House which opened in 1866.
The ’Arcadian’ quality of the streets is most evident in Aldridge Road Villas, where mature plane trees provide high amenity value. The large plane tree in the garden of St Andrew’s House in Tavistock Road at the northern end of Aldridge Road Villas, is a fine example of the species and a local landmark of great townscape value. Other specimens in the area include black poplar, ash, sycamore, tree of heaven, lime and lombardy poplar.
Many of the properties in the area have been converted into flats, although the presence of gardens of a reasonable size continues to provide opportunities for family housing.
