Kensington

A palace with a park attached, a high street with a Georgian village behind it, and Leighton's Arab hall.

Kensington was a village in the Domesday Book and would probably have stayed a suburb if William III had not been asthmatic. In 1689 he bought a house at the western edge of the fields, had Wren enlarge it, and moved the court out of the smoke of Whitehall; Kensington Palace has been royal ever since. Queen Victoria was born in it in 1819 and was living there when she was woken at five in the morning to be told she was queen. The State Apartments are open, and the gardens run east from the door for a mile. The village became a town in the nineteenth century, and Kensington High Street became one of the great shopping streets, with department stores that have mostly gone; what remains is a broad street with a Georgian village, Kensington Church Street, running north off it, full of antique dealers. The best of it is a house that an artist built for himself. Frederic Leighton spent thirty years on Leighton House and gave it an Arab hall lined with Damascus tiles round a fountain, which is as strange and complete a room as London has. Two other things sit at the edges: the Design Museum, which moved into the old Commonwealth Institute and its swooping roof in 2016, and Kensington Palace Gardens, a private avenue of embassies and billionaires that is the most expensive street in the country.