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In 1710, Robert Pollard was the owner of the old buildings of Bayard’s Watering Place and 6 acres of land in what had once been common fields of Westbourne Green. He sold them to Thomas Upton and his wife Jane in 1725, and they started a farm. The Upton Farm fields, at the heart of Bayswater, stretched approximately from the current Queensway in the west to Craven Terrace in the east, and from the current Bayswater Road in the south to Bishop’s Road (now called Bishop’s Bridge Road) in the north.
The Upton Farm buildings were set back from the highway at the end of a tree-lined lane. The farmland was let to a number of farmers in narrow rectangular strips.
The current Queensway was then a narrow lane, and the main thoroughfare to Westbourne Green further north. In about 1751 the inn on its corner with the Uxbridge Road, originally called the Oxford Arms, was renamed the Black Lion Inn, and the lane became known as Black Lion Lane. The Black Lion pub still exists.
Below is a 19th century copy of William Gardner’s 1729 plan of Upton Farm. The plan shows field boundaries, the dimensions of each field, names of tenants and describes different kinds of land use.
Upton Farm lands in 1729