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A street, locality and entrance to Kensington
Gardens located halfway along Bayswater Road, so called in honour of Queen Victoria, in her guise as the Duchess of Lancaster.
The station is actually sited opposite Marlborough Gate, just to the east. In its heyday, Lancaster Gate’s Christ church
was nicknamed ‘the thousand pound church’ because of the large sums collected from the wealthy Bayswater congregation
every Sunday. Dry rot led to the demolition of the body of the church in 1978 and the spire now finds itself attached to an
ecclesiastical-looking block of flats. Lancaster Gate is Britain’s most densely populated ward, with almost 100 persons
per acre. The ward has a high proportion of young, well-educated, single residents living alone in privately rented accommodation.
There are very few families with children or households with more than one pensioner.
Lytton Strachey, the eminent biographer, spent 25 years at 69 Lancaster Gate, while JM Barrie lived around the corner at 100
Bayswater Road. For over seventy years Lancaster Gate was the home of the Football Association, the governing body of English
football. The FA relocated to Soho Square in 2000, selling its old building to property developers for £7¼ million, and moved
again in 2009, to Wembley Stadium.
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