Gloucester Road – the street – runs north-south between Kensington Gardens (at which point it is known as Palace Gate) and the Old Brompton Road at the south end. At its intersection with Cromwell Road is Gloucester Road tube station, close to which there are several pubs, restaurants, many hotels and St. Stephen’s Church (built in 1867 and, notably, the church warden of which was the poet T. S. Eliot).
The road is named after Maria, Duchess of Gloucester and Edinburgh who built a house there in 1805. It was earlier called Hog Moore Lane (1612), that is ’lane through marshy ground where hogs are kept’, a name that was still used until about 1850.
Gloucester Road is the residence (25B Froxbury Court) of the fictional barrister Horace Rumpole of John Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey series of short stories.
Gloucester Road underground station is in two parts: sub-surface platforms, opened in 1868 by the Metropolitan Railway as part of the company’s extension of the Inner Circle route from Paddington to South Kensington and to Westminster, and deep-level platforms opened in 1906 by the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway. A variety of underground and mainline services have operated over the sub-surface tracks. The deep-level platforms have remained largely unaltered. A disused sub-surface platform features periodic art installations as part of Transport for London’s Art on the Underground scheme.
