Some London streets have parking problems.
Some London streets have bin day.
And then there’s the London street where the main concern is whether your neighbour is a billionaire… or an ambassador.
Kensington Palace Gardens.
One of those extraordinary, half-forgotten London places.
Not a square.
Not a street.
Not really even a road.
More… a statement.
Kensington Palace Gardens.
W8.
Private. Exclusive. Secure.
A place where the super-rich live cheek by jowl with ambassadors and high commissioners.
Houses here go for far into eight figures – tens of millions.
Sixty million would not raise an eyebrow.
And at the same time…
it’s about as close as London gets to a diplomatic enclave.
Money and statecraft,
side by side behind the same line of plane trees.
The loftier residents,
we’re told, call it…
KPG.
Yes.
KPG.
Which, depending on your turn of mind,
is either very grand…
or just a whisker away from KGB.
Now here’s the thing.
This wasn’t always a billionaire’s boulevard.
It began life as the kitchen garden of Kensington Palace.
Vegetables. Herbs.
The practical business of feeding a royal household.
And then, mid-19th century London does what London does best.
It reinvents.
James Pennethorne lays it out in the 1840s.
And up go the houses.
Between about 1844 and 1870.
Not houses, really.
Palaces pretending to be houses.
We’re talking seriously big beasts.
Forty rooms would not be unusual here.
Some more.
Even the smaller ones,
and that’s a relative term,
run to twenty or thirty rooms.
The great Victorian novelist William Makepeace Thackeray’s house,
now the Israeli Embassy, comes in at 24 rooms.
Others comfortably double that.
This is not domestic scale.
This is architectural swagger.
And then, of course,
there’s the darker chapter.
Because between 1940 and 1948…
Nos 7, 8 and 9 Kensington Palace Gardens
became something else entirely.
The Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre.
Or if you prefer, the London Cage.
In effect…
the most important war crimes interrogation unit outside Germany.
Where German prisoners were questioned.
And,
depending on who you read…
“questioned” may be doing quite a lot of work in that sentence.
The man in charge,
Colonel Alexander Scotland, always denied brutality.
He tried to publish his memoirs in the 1950s.
The authorities effectively slapped a D-Notice on it.
What appeared was heavily redacted.
A lot of those restrictions have only been lifted in recent years.
And historians like Helen Fry, in her book The London Cage, have gone back into the archives and shed a good deal of light on what went on here.
We know some of the methods.
Sleep deprivation.
Stress positions.
Humiliation.
Men forced to stand for hours.
Forced to strip.
Pushed to the edge of endurance.
Not necessarily leaving marks…
but not exactly gentle persuasion either.
No full inquiry was ever carried out.
Then or since.
Which leaves us with a rather uncomfortable thought.
That in this most exclusive of London streets…
behind those high walls and clipped hedges…
some of the grimmest business of the Second World War was being conducted.
Quietly.
Systematically.
And, to a degree…
still not entirely explained.
So let that sink in. Just there, you’ve got Kensington Palace. Full of major and minor royals. King Charles, when he was Prince Charles, called Kensington Palace the aunt heap. And then just a stone’s throw away from the palace you’ve got Nazi war criminals being tortured. Or another way of putting that, one lot of Germans here. Another lot of Germans there.
Welcome to Kensington, ladies and gentlemen.
And the funny business doesn’t end on that note.
The Cold War arrives.
And suddenly…
this quiet, tree-lined avenue becomes a front line of sorts.
Soviet. Czechoslovak.
Eyes watching eyes.
Diplomats observing diplomats.
A street that looks serene…
and hums with invisible tension.
And today?
The embassies are still here.
Czech. Slovak. Russian.
Nepal. Lebanon.
Alongside private residences of staggering wealth.
A place where…
if you are very rich indeed,
you live here.
And if you are very powerful indeed…
you represent your country here.
Kensington Palace Gardens.
From cabbages…
to interrogations…
to oligarchs and ambassadors.
And where, if you’re feeling particularly grand…
you don’t live in Kensington.
You live in…
KPG.
But tomorrow…
we leave the embassies and
the billionaires behind.
And step into a rather different London world.
A world of sawdust.
Spotlights.
And one of those extraordinary, half-forgotten London characters.
A circus proprietor.
In Kensington Palace Gardens.
With, as it happens…
a rather intriguing Russian connection.
That’s tomorrow.
London calling.
London tempting.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time.
History time.
And until tomorrow…
hey, it’s the first day of spring. And it’s perfect out there. So here’s to no end of great Londoning.
See you tomorrow.