The Effect
It is the 1930s, and the people of London - still shaken by the reverberations of the First World War, and living in the shadow of a second looming on the horizon - want to forget their troubles and enjoy themselves.
One night, a young couple arrives at an opulent townhouse in Bayswater to attend a ball. The address is 23-24 Leinster Gardens, and the couple have paid ten guineas apiece for their tickets to be there; a considerable sum of money. The couple knock on the door of the grand five storey residence, with its doric porches and towering sash windows, and wait to be admitted, giddy with anticipation. But, to their astonishment, nobody answers.
As they wait on the front step of the house, this young couple has no way of knowing that the property has been subject to strange goings-on for some time. For almost eighty years, in fact, delivery drivers have turned up to Leinster Gardens only to have to double back on themselves, guests there to attend lunches and soirees forced to return to their homes. They might have found themselves thinking it was simply an empty London townhouse, its owner away in the country for a season. But there is more to it than that…
The young couple waiting to attend the ball carry on knocking at the door. But there is still no response and, not only that, more and more people have started to join them. These people are also dressed in the silks, furs and finery befitting an evening out in an affluent London postcode. And they all knock on the door of 23-4 Leinster Gardens, too. But still no one answers.
And then the people gathered there, having all paid ten guineas for their tickets, realise that there is something very odd about this particular London address. There do not seem to be any lights on within, there is no hustle and bustle behind its windows, no strains of elegant music drifting beneath its doors. There are no signs of life at the property at all, in fact. The more the young couple look at the building, the more it appears totally dead behind the eyes.
But why could this be? What secrets, exactly, lie hidden inside the walls of Leinster Gardens? It is peculiar that, despite the house having solid walls, pillars and porticoes, it is almost as though it doesn’t exist at all.
The Method
A young couple dressed for a party, is standing on the front step of 23-4 Leinster Gardens knocking at its door. But it is only when they have been there for several minutes waiting for somebody to answer that they realise something about the houses is seriously off. Indeed, they do not look like houses at all.
That is because… they are not. The building’s towering sash windows are not made from wood and glass, but plaster and paint. For they are, in fact, painted on. 23-4 Leinster Gardens, for all their five stories and doric porches, are not solid houses. They are facades only, constructed from one single wall, rising up from the ground like a stage set. If the young couple had ventured around the rear of the properties that evening, they would have seen what was going on straight away, noticed the gap in the row of expensive townhouses, the single wall filling it propped and braced from behind.
So why would anyone build the facades of two fake houses in the middle of a row of other very desirable pre-existing properties? Especially in a city like London, where space is at a premium with someone always willing to pay for it?
The story of 23-4 Leinster Gardens started in the 1860s, the era of London’s earliest underground railway lines. This was a time before tunnel-boring equipment and so, in order to construct each tunnel needed for the trains, the transport company had to buy the land above the proposed route, dig a trench and then fill it back in again. This meant that any buildings above these huge trenches had to be demolished, with the entire construction process cutting vast swathes through the capital. Rows of sumptuous houses and genteel squares were left like perfect sets of teeth with missing incisors: spoiled by unsightly holes where the lines had been excavated.
And, to add insult to injury, many of these gaps had to be left so that large vents could be built, to ventilate the fumes from the then-steam-driven trains. For this reason, the houses and squares that once stood in these locations could not be rebuilt.
When the South Kensington tube was extended in 1865, the transport company tasked with digging the line was told, in no uncertain terms, that they were not to leave an ugly chasm in Leinster Gardens. The affluent residents of the area were dead against it. They didn’t want the aesthetics of their street to be ruined, and they certainly didn’t want their own houses to be devalued by the process. If the underground tunnel had to be dug there, the residents insisted, then the transport company must hide the evidence. So the facades of two townhouses were built, comprising a single wall with false painted-on windows and porticoes that lead nowhere. It was only those privy to the secret of the fake houses that would know they were there, would ever realise they were not solid, like the rest of the row.
So what of the unfortunate couple who paid a costly ten guineas each for their ball tickets? A ball that wasn’t happening at an address that didn’t exist? The whole enterprise had been a dastardly scheme carried out by a London confidence trickster. The young couple, just like everyone else who turned up to the ball that night, had been well and truly scammed.
And the pranks and high jinx at 23-4 Leinster Gardens continue to this day, with unsuspecting couriers and fast food delivery drivers knocking on the doors of these elegant houses, still, while the residences remain one of London’s most unexpected secrets.
© 2025, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.
