Bayswater & Paddington

Two neighbourhoods either side of a railway: canal boats and stucco terraces, and the platform Paddington Bear was found on.

Paddington is the station and what grew round it. Brunel's terminus opened in 1838 and was rebuilt in 1854 with the iron and glass train shed still over the platforms; before the trains there was the canal, which reached here in 1801 and gave the district a basin full of narrowboats and a corner called Little Venice, where three waterways meet under willow trees. Bayswater is the housing: cream stucco terraces and garden squares laid out from the 1820s on a plan meant to rival Belgravia. It never quite managed it, and that is the making of the place. The big houses became hotels and flats, and the area filled with people from everywhere, so Queensway and Westbourne Grove are among the most mixed shopping streets in London and you can eat Lebanese, Greek, Brazilian and Chinese within a few hundred yards. Two things happened here that changed the world. At St Mary's Hospital on Praed Street, Alexander Fleming came back from holiday in 1928 to a dish of bacteria he had left by an open window, found mould growing on it, and named what the mould was making penicillin; the little laboratory is a museum. And at the station in 1958, Michael Bond set down a small bear from Peru with a label round his neck and named him after it. The statue is on Platform 1, and there is usually a queue to be photographed with it.