The Houses That Hide a Railway Gap
At 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens, the doors and windows are part of a façade, not the front of a home. Behind the decorative fronts is an open section of railway cutting, where trains pass below street level. There are no rooms behind the doors—and no resident to answer a knock.
The gap dates to the construction of the Metropolitan Railway, an early underground line that ran beneath this part of London. Much of the route was built by cut-and-cover: workers dug a trench, laid the tracks, and covered the railway again. At this point, however, the line was left open. The trains originally ran on steam, so the open stretch helped smoke and exhaust escape.
A Missing Pair of Buildings, Replaced by a Front
Building the railway meant removing houses along the route. At numbers 23 and 24, builders later put up façades that matched the neighboring terrace, preserving the street’s continuous row of grand homes. From the pavement, the fronts look convincing; from behind, they conceal no house at all.
The contrast is the point: a polished residential street sits above a working railway, and the architecture makes the interruption easy to miss. A knock at the door reaches only the boundary between those two worlds.
