Like Bar 190 and 109 before it, this venue takes its address as its name – on a grand street named for a queen
54 Queen’s Gate holds two hundred and sixteen reviews and a 4.4, and its name is, once again in this survey, its own address – number 54 on the grand South Kensington street called Queen’s Gate.
The address as name, once more
We have now met a whole family of these address-based names: Bar 190 at 190 Queen’s Gate, just down the same street; 109 Bar; 3 Henrietta Street in the Covent Garden survey. And here is another, 54 Queen’s Gate, taking its house number and its street as its complete identity.
The virtues, as always, are honesty and specificity. There is exactly one number 54 on Queen’s Gate, and that is where this venue is. The name makes no claim it cannot keep, invents no heritage, decodes to no forgotten reference. It is the plain, truthful, address-based naming that this survey has come to appreciate as an antidote to all the borrowed grandeur and accidental misnaming elsewhere. Notably, this is the second venue in the survey on Queen’s Gate alone to name itself after its door number – the street clearly encourages the habit.
Queen’s Gate
The street itself is worth knowing. Queen’s Gate is one of the grand thoroughfares of South Kensington – a long, wide street of imposing white stucco Victorian townhouses, running down toward Kensington Gardens and the royal park. It was laid out and built in the great expansion of South Kensington that followed the Great Exhibition of 1851, part of the same wave of grand development that created “Albertopolis” and the whole museum quarter.
The name “Queen’s Gate” honours, of course, Queen Victoria – the gate being a reference to an entrance to Kensington Gardens near the palace. It is one of countless streets, gates and squares in this part of London named for the queen and her family, marking the deep royal associations of the Kensington area, with the palace at its heart.
The grand townhouse
The great Victorian townhouses of Queen’s Gate are themselves a specific and impressive building type – tall, white-stuccoed, many-storeyed mansions built for the wealthy Victorian upper-middle classes, with grand entrances, high ceilings and rooms of considerable scale. Many have since become hotels, embassies, institutions and flats, their original single-family grandeur adapted to new uses. A bar or venue at a number on Queen’s Gate is very likely housed in one of these imposing white palaces, converted from its original domestic splendour.
The venue
A well-regarded venue doing a solid 4.4 across a fair sample of two hundred and sixteen people, honestly named after its address on one of South Kensington’s grandest streets.
Verdict
Well-rated and honestly named after its own front door, on a grand Victorian street named for a queen.
Why the Victorians numbered everything
There is a small history hidden in the very existence of a precise street number like 54. The systematic numbering of houses along streets is a surprisingly modern development – it spread widely only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as cities grew too large for the old system of naming individual houses by signs and landmarks. Before numbering, you found a house by its sign, or by directions relative to known landmarks, exactly the way pubs were located.
The coming of house numbers was driven by the practical needs of a growing city: the postal service, which needed to deliver letters efficiently; the census and the tax collector, who needed to identify every household; the general administration of an expanding population. The grand, orderly, numbered streets of Victorian South Kensington – laid out and numbered from scratch – are a product of exactly this modern, rational, administrative impulse. A venue named 54 Queen’s Gate is, in a sense, named after the Victorian passion for order and enumeration that created its address in the first place.
Verdict
Well-rated and honestly named after its own front door, on a grand Victorian street named for a queen.
Go to number 54, on the street named for Victoria’s gate to her gardens, and enjoy a venue that tells you, plainly and truthfully, exactly where to find it.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
My kid asked if this was real. I said “sort of.” She accepted that. That’s the right answer for anything about London.
My mum’s been in London since the 50s. She recognizes every word and that terrifies her.