Wide avenues of red brick mansion blocks run down to a canal towpath lined with white stucco villas and moored narrowboats.
What Maida Vale looks like
Randolph Avenue and carry the widest of the mansion block streets, five and six storeys of red brick behind communal front gardens and clipped hedges. Balconies and canted bay windows repeat down each block to a shared cornice line.
The blocks went up between 1897 and 1910, starting with on Lauderdale Road. Some fronts stay plain red brick and others break into bands of white stucco between the piers. The red brick Sephardic synagogue further down the same road has a domed roof over its own pediment.
Where the two avenues meet, an Underground station shows a red terracotta front from 1915, with tall brick pilasters and a rounded corner. Its tiled entrance hall and the mosaic roundels above the stairs, laid before the Underground's familiar bar and circle, are still the originals.
South toward , the brick gives way to white stucco villas set back behind dark gates, one of them still holding the spire of the church behind it in view from the street. runs along the canal here, where narrowboats sit moored two and three deep below the towpath at , the junction with the Paddington arm of the Grand Union.
Shot in Maida Vale
Alfred Hitchcock filmed Roddy's descent down the station's original wooden escalators for Downhill in 1927, and the film Runners used the same escalators for a shot down into the station more than fifty years later, both leading down from the same red terracotta entrance hall. About Time's Tim and Mary montage shows the couple crossing several of the station's own platforms as their relationship moves forward.
Paddington, 2014
Played Westbourne Oak Station, present day
The production filmed the station's own red terracotta exterior as the fictional Westbourne Oak Station, the stop where Paddington first arrives in London. The canopy and the pilasters across the front read on screen exactly as they do on Elgin Avenue.
The pre-war apartment buildings along Riverside Drive and West End Avenue share Maida Vale's scale, blocks of flats built for the middle classes in the same decades around 1900 to 1910 behind wide tree lined avenues. New York's buildings run taller, with more elaborate stone cornices and fire escapes on the rear. The street grid is also a strict rectangle rather than Maida Vale's gentler curves, so a wide establishing shot gives it away. Try searching pre-war apartment buildings now.
Montpellier's white stucco villas and colonnaded terraces carry the same Regency rendering as the canal side of Maida Vale, cream fronts with black iron balconies and porticoed doors. Cheltenham has no canal or moored boats in frame, so a shot that needs water has to stay by the towpath and use Montpellier only for the stucco terraces themselves. Try searching white stucco villas terraces now.
Marchmont's tenement flats run five and six storeys to a matching cornice line, the same scale as Maida Vale's mansion blocks and built across a similar span of decades. The sandstone there is a warmer gold than Maida Vale's red brick, which shows in any shot with direct sun, so overcast light or a tighter grade holds the match better. Try searching sandstone tenement flats now.
