SL London's Kensington Square and Greyhound Pub

Kensington Square is a garden square surrounded by terraced houses founded in 1685 by builder Robert Young. It is located in what was then the village of Kensington, a few miles west of the city of London. The locality became popular from 1689 onwards when King William III choose to move his royal residence to Nottingham House (now Kensington Palace), he was asthmatic and wished to avoid the smog of the city . Today Kensington Square is the oldest such square in London and rates as some of the most expensive residential property in the capital.

The original house at No 1 was built around 1685 and is thought to have been a tavern since at least 1697. The earliest reference to the name Greyhound has been found on an insurance document from 1710. This first pub was described as a modest two-storey brick building with a steep tiled roof, dormer windows and closets at the rear. An early nineteenth century addition was a porch supported by slim columns on top of which were two stone greyhounds. This building was demolished in 1899 and then rebuilt in to it's current familiar form.

In 1940 some of the houses in the square were rendered uninhabitable by German bomb damage during the blitz. The Greyhound emerged unscathed from that ordeal only to be badly damaged by a gas explosion in 1977. A mystery surrounds the fate of the stone Greyhounds from the earlier building. One is known to have survived in a garden of neighbouring house until the 1950s when it was reportedly removed to East Grinstead, the other has disappeared without trace. It might be a tall order but it would be wonderful if they could be found and returned to their pride of place.