Pimlico

Belgravia's quieter cousin: white terraces on reclaimed marsh, a post-war estate that made its own heat, and Tate Britain at the end.

Pimlico is what Thomas Cubitt built next. Having finished Belgravia for the Grosvenors, he took the marshy ground south of it from 1825, raised the level with earth dug out of St Katharine Docks, and laid a grid of white stucco terraces across it. The houses are the same idea as Belgravia's and a size smaller, which is exactly how they were sold: a newspaper in 1877 described the residents as people not rich enough to luxuriate in Belgravia proper. That has kept it pleasantly ordinary. There are three garden squares, St George's, Warwick and Eccleston; there are pubs on corners; and there are more small hotels than anywhere else in central London, so a good part of the population is only here for three nights. Two twentieth-century blocks stand out. Dolphin Square, finished in 1937, put 1,250 flats round a garden and filled them with members of parliament. Churchill Gardens, built between 1946 and 1962 to replace bombed streets, was heated for fifty years by hot water piped under the river from Battersea Power Station, and the glass accumulator tower that held it still stands on the embankment. At the eastern edge, on the site of the Millbank penitentiary from which convicts were shipped to Australia, is Tate Britain, which holds the national collection of British art and the largest gathering of Turners anywhere.