In the twenties this was still a rural inn, with sloping, red-tiled roof and dormer windows, standing quite alone. [37a] A visitor coming from Paddington Green passed to it by a quiet field-path—the Bishop’s Walk, now Bishop’s Road—through a region of pleasant pastures and hedgerow elms. A weeping ash and the sign of the Boscobel Oak stood on a green in front of the house, and there were benches for the wayfarer and a tea-garden.
In 1837, with the advent of the Great Western Railway, all these country surroundings began to disappear, and the fields were soon cut up for roads. The house was now brought forward so as to stand nearer the road, and the tea-gardens were sold for building. [37b] The present Royal Oak public-house, standing more forward than its predecessor, is 89, Bishop’s Road and No. 1, Porchester Road.
A Welsh landlord (apparently in the early twenties) named Davies paid a £50 rent, which he could not get back by catering for his few local customers, chiefly nurserymen. At the present day the property is said to have changed hands for £24,000.
[Henry Walker, in the Bayswater Annual for 1885; also in the Paddington, Kensington, and Bayswater Chronicle for May 31, 1884, with a woodcut from a drawing of the Royal Oak in 1825. Cf. Rutton in Home Counties Magazine, ii., p. 21.]
In the thirties and forties the Bayswater district was full of small tea-gardens, one of which, the Princess Royal, [38] ‘opposite Black Lion Lane, now called Queen’s Road,’ may be mentioned. It was kept in the forties by James Bott, previously of the Archery Tavern, Bayswater. Mr. Bott had a bowling-green and tea-rooms, an elegant fish-pond well stocked with gold and silver fish, and ‘an extensive archery ground, 185 feet long, and wide enough for two sets of targets.’ His advertisements hold out two special attractions—one that any gentleman fond of archery might practise there from nine o’clock in the morning till two in the afternoon for ten shillings a year; the other that the grounds led by the nearest way to the Kensal Green Cemetery.
