For as long as most Londoners can remember, Queensway has been the ugly duckling to the otherwise rarefied “swan” neighbourhoods surrounding Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park.
It remained a defiantly scruffy strip of luggage and souvenir shops, mobile phone repairers, bookies and fast-food outlets, with property values a fraction of those in some neighbouring quarters.
The remarkable west London gentrification tide that turned Notting Hill into one of the world’s most famous and desirable addresses simply passed by the W2 location best known for its icerink and the venerable Mandarin Kitchen Chinese restaurant. But Queensway is finally having a moment — a £3 billion moment to be exact.
Last week, the first residents were handed the keys of their swish apartments created out of the shell of the former building towards the north end of Queensway.
In May, one of London’s most respected restaurateurs, Jeremy King, the man who co-founded Piccadilly dining institution The Wolseley, is opening his latest venture, called The Park, at the southern end on the corner of Bayswater Road.
Over the next two to three years, seven major new buildings — some now nearing completion — will change the landscape of Queensway forever. But it is the revival of the vast retail emporium that once stood alongside Harrods and Selfridges as one of the pre-eminent department stores of London that will define and propel Queensway’s upwards trajectory.
William Whiteley’s original shop first opened on Westbourne Grove in 1863.
When the store relocated to its current site in 1911, it was big enough to have a golf course on the roof. But by the Seventies the store had fallen on harder times, closing in 1981, before reopening, rather half-heartedly, as a shopping centre in 1989 and shutting again definitively in 2018 after the Westfield mall a couple of miles to the west effectively killed it off.
By then its new owners, property company Meyer Bergman, now known as MARK Capital Management, had drawn up the £1.5 billon renaissance plans now coming to fruition as The Whiteley development.
Six years on, little remains of the original building other than the colonnaded Grade II listed facade, the distinctive dome, clock and cupulas on the roof and the magnificent internal staircase.
The interiors where hundreds of staff once served affluent Londoners everything “from a pin to an elephant” — or so the company’s slogan promised — is now being converted into 139 apartments, Britain’s first Six Senses luxury wellness hotel, 20 shops and restaurants, a Third Space gym, and an Everyman cinema to a design by starchitects Foster + Partners. More than 90 of the residential units have already been sold off-plan, including one of the two penthouses, at prices starting from £1.5million for the smallest one bed, ranging up to £50 million, raising almost £600 million for MARK and co-investor CC Land, which have signed up Finchatton as development manager.
Finchatton co-founder Alex Michelin, soon to step away to his new venture Valouran, insists Queensway should become a diverse, cool, eclectic street.
“In another three years’ time we expect people walking down this street to be saying, ‘wow this is totally different to what it was’.”
It is a bold ambition, but for Queensway, the once glamorous shopping district that lost its lustre, it really does appear that the era of unloved luggage shop tat is finally coming to an end.
