A square that predates the palace
Kensington Square was begun in the 1680s, when Kensington was a village on the road west out of London and the land south of its high street was still open ground. The developer, Thomas Young, set out house plots around a central garden and sold them to people of means who wanted country air within reach of town. Building went slowly at first, and the square might have stayed half finished if the neighbourhood had not changed around it.
It changed in 1689, when William III bought Nottingham House on the far side of the road and began turning it into Kensington Palace. The court followed the king west, and the houses on the square filled with the people who served him. For a generation this was one of the most fashionable addresses outside the City and Westminster, which is why it is counted among the oldest squares in London and not merely among the prettiest.
Most of the houses were rebuilt or refronted over the following two centuries, so what you see now is a mixture of periods rather than a single set piece. A few are thought to keep early fabric behind later faces, and the shape of the square, the width of its plots and the garden at its centre are essentially the ones Young laid down.
Finding it, and why so few people do
From High Street Kensington station, on the Circle and District lines, cross the high street and turn down Young Street or Derry Street. Either brings you into the square within a minute or two. Most visitors never make the turn, because the high street holds their attention and the ways into the square look like service lanes from the pavement.
Step inside and the traffic noise falls away almost at once. The houses face inward onto the garden, the pavements are narrow, and one slow lap of the whole square takes about five minutes. On a weekday evening the loudest sound is usually somebody letting themselves in with a key.
Young Street is worth a glance on the way in. William Makepeace Thackeray lived there in the 1840s, in the house where he wrote much of Vanity Fair, and the plaque on its front says as much.
The plaques round the garden
Blue plaques mark several of the houses, and reading them in turn is the easiest way to see the square properly. John Stuart Mill, the philosopher who wrote On Liberty, lived at number 18. The composer Sir Hubert Parry, best remembered for his setting of Jerusalem, lived next door at number 17. Sir Edward Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite painter, lived at number 41 for a few years in the 1860s.
The actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, for whom Shaw wrote the part of Eliza Doolittle, lived at number 33. Sir John Simon, the surgeon who became one of the founders of public health in Victorian England, lived and died at number 40. There are other names on other walls, and part of the pleasure is spotting them for yourself rather than ticking them off a list.
Taken together, the plaques say something about the square that no single house does. For more than three hundred years it has suited people who needed to be close to the centre of things and wanted, at the end of the day, to shut the door on them. That is still its character, and it is exactly why the square feels so different from the high street a minute away.
The locked garden, and the lanes beyond it
The garden at the centre is private, kept by and for the residents, and its gates are locked. You walk round it rather than through it, which suits the place: the railings, the trees and the lit windows on all four sides make it a view rather than a park.
From the edges of the square, small streets lead away into a quiet pocket of terraces and mews that most visitors to W8 never find. A few minutes to the east, Kensington Court runs up to the park road lined with tall red brick houses, and a small hotel stands on its corner facing Kensington Gardens. From there the palace and its lawns are simply across the road.
West along the high street, the Design Museum has occupied the former Commonwealth Institute building since 2016, and beyond it Holland Park keeps its Kyoto Garden, one of the calmest corners of west London on a weekday morning. Both lie within about twenty minutes' walk of the square.
A square for a longer stay
Kensington Square rewards repetition more than a single visit, which is why the desk mentions it most often to guests staying in W8 for a week or more. A turn round it in the morning, on the way to the park, is a better start to the day than any hotel breakfast room, and by the third day the square begins to feel like a neighbourhood rather than a sight.
Stays of that length are arranged under the long booking, which covers anything from a weekend to a working week in London with a companion as part of the diary rather than an appointment in it. The desk asks for the dates, the address you are staying at and a rough idea of how much of each day you want company for, then quotes the whole arrangement once, in writing, before anything is agreed. A single night on its own is £1,800; anything longer is priced for its real shape rather than hour by hour.
Kensington has its own page on this site, listing its hotels, stations and walking distances, and South Kensington is ten minutes south for the museums. For a dinner a little further off, the note on Walton Street covers a quieter corner of Chelsea that suits an early table.
Who the desk sends to W8
For a long dinner in the streets round the square, Margo is the obvious first name: early thirties, properly grown up and happiest with one room and three hours in it. She lives in Knightsbridge, a twenty minute stroll away beside the park, so a W8 evening asks nothing awkward of her.
Guests who begin with the blondes list will find two women well placed for this side of London. Thea, caramel blonde and green eyed, lives a few streets from the museums and likes a supper that runs late and a slow walk afterwards. Nora, honey blonde, lives in Paddington and will cross the park on foot while there is still light, which is the nicest way there is to arrive in Kensington.
Send the desk the dates, the address and a line about what the days hold, and the reply comes back in writing. She receives the fee from you in person on arrival.
Filed under: most of the names in this note also sit on the blondes list in by request.