Hidden Kensington: The Guide's Secret Sub-Villages

Greater London, United Kingdom

500 tickets 3.2 km · about 1 hr 40 mins · 13 stops · Premium walk How Walking Tickets work

ArchitectureReligion & SpiritualityRoyalty & Nobility

This walk reveals Kensington’s hidden sub-villages, where grand streets conceal older lanes, courts, estates, and village-like pockets. It traces the area from Japan House London and High Street Kensington Underground Station through 16 Young Street, Kensington Square, and Kensington Palace, showing how planned squares, mews, and church paths preserve the feel of the old parish. Along the way, it highlights the literary Kensington of Thackeray and John Stuart Mill, ending at Saint Mary Abbots.

The stops

01
Japan House London
Forty yards along the High Street from the station stands this free cultural centre showcasing 'the best of Japan' through rotating exhibitions, a shop, and a ground-floor gallery — recent shows have included a exhibition on the craft of…
02
High Street Kensington Underground Station
The traditional meeting point for Kensington walking tours: come out of the station onto Kensington High Street, where an arcade of shops links the platforms to the pavement.
03
Former Barkers Department Store
A Grade II-listed Art Deco palace built in stages between 1930 and 1958 for John Barker & Co., founded in 1870 and once one of London's largest department stores, with more than forty departments and workshops at its Victorian peak.
04
16 Young Street (Thackeray's House)
A blue plaque marks the house where William Makepeace Thackeray lived and wrote three of his major novels — Vanity Fair, Pendennis, and Henry Esmond — while Young Street was still a quiet lane running down to Kensington Square.
05
Kensington Square
Laid out from 1685, this is the sixth-oldest garden square in London — after Bloomsbury, Leicester, Red Lion and Soho Squares and Lincoln's Inn Fields — and the first square built outside the old centre of the capital.
06
Thackeray Street
A short, characterful street leading out of Kensington Square, home to a French café, the Italian deli Ottomezzo, and the Thackeray Gallery — a small space showing the work of living British artists, whose owner keeps her door open to…
07
Kynance Mews
Kynance Mews preserves one of Kensington's hidden service villages, where horses were stabled, carriages kept and coachmen lodged above in the nineteenth century.
08
Kensington Palace
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09
Kensington Palace Gardens
focus on history of gardens and the ambassies
10
Candella Tea Room
A superb, very traditional afternoon tea service — at roughly a third of the price of the same spread at the Ritz, and a fifth of the cost for a Cream Tea.
11
Ffiona's Restaurant
Owned and run by sisters Ffiona and Althea, this restaurant was voted Best Restaurant in Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster in 2024.
12
Kensington Church Walk
A narrow footpath opening onto a hidden, cottage-lined, postage-stamp-sized courtyard tucked inside another secluded courtyard — like a pair of Russian stacking dolls.
13
St Mary Abbots
Saint Mary Abbots is Kensington's old parish heart, and its name recalls the abbots and abbesses of Abingdon Abbey, which held the manor in the Middle Ages.