Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
canaries. Lower down the street, the slender tower of St Michael's rises above the vista of
chimney pots - derelict and dating from 1861. On the walls of the houses opposite are the
remains of coronation decorations, from which the reds and blues have fled, leaving the
royal portraits in an advanced stage of jaundice.
London window-boxes in the humbler streets often have a feature in the way of decor-
ation which occurs again and again - a little wooden gate tacked on in the middle of the
box, a curious relic of country life.
Paddington Green is worth a visit. It retains a little of its eighteenth-century charm in
the shape of the parish church,
c
. 1790, by a little-known architect, J. Plaw. It is of London
stockbrick, and is shaped like a Greek cross with a white painted cupola. The whole thing
looks rather attractive, especially in the spring when the trees are speckled with points of
green and the tulips are out. The first London buses started here, a connexion that found
expression in the ballad of Pretty Polly Perkins. Today, Mrs Siddons gazes from her ped-
estal at the buses through the plane trees. On Paddington Green, at the corner of Harrow
Road, is the Siddons Gallery. An art gallery is unusual in this part of London. The own-
er, who retired at the age of ninety a few years ago, was a gentleman of the old school
who knew Phil May. It was a pleasure to purchase drawings from his stock (I bought a
fine early Turner drawing for a fiver), and there was this piquant contrast between the Ed-
wardian atmosphere of the gallery and the petrol-perfumed Harrow Road outside, where
villainous-looking youths lounged about in those crepe-soled shoes affectionately known
as brothel-creepers. I used to get a sort of mental picture of Art (draped in flowing robes
and armed with a palette) keeping the Philistines at bay, or else - a subject for a classical
cartoon - planting a banner on Harrow Road and entitled, 'With the Flag to Paddington
Green'.
Beyond the police station, barrack-like and grim, the Harrow Road is lined with terraced
houses, covered with cracks like the skin of a crocodile. These terraces of the middle of
the nineteenth century are of fine design, but utterly decayed. Cracks in the stucco reveal
the brick construction of the pediments, washing dries on balconies, and pigeons fly in at
the windows of empty houses.
