West Kensington, formerly North End, is an area in the ancient parish of Fulham, in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, England, 3.4 miles (5.5 km) west of Charing Cross. It covers most of the London postal area of W14, including the area around Barons Court tube station, and is defined as the area between Lillie Road and Hammersmith Road to the west, Fulham Palace Road to the south, Hammersmith to the north and West Brompton and Earl's Court to the east. The area is bisected by the major London artery the A4, locally known as the Talgarth Road. Its main local thoroughfare is the North End Road. It is predominantly a dense residential area with the Queen's Club in its midst and is bordered by the Lillie Bridge railway depot, the now defunct Earls Court Exhibition Centre site, Olympia Exhibition Centre and the commercial centres at Fulham and Hammersmith Broadway. Name "West Kensington" is an early marketing construct, a ploy by two Victorian developers who found they had trouble selling their rapidly erected estate of terraced housing in the hamlet of North End on the outskirts of the village of Walham Green. In 1876 William Henry Gibbs and John P. Flew, builders from Dorset, decided to capitalise on their modest success in Kensington, by speculatively building 1,200 houses on the market gardens west of the West London Railway in Fulham. However, the housing slump of the 1880s left them with many unsold properties. They succeeded in persuading the Metropolitan Borough of Fulham to have North End renamed 'West Kensington' to attract new investors to their empty houses. History From the High Middle Ages, the hamlet of North End in the County of Middlesex was mainly farmland and market gardens, with a few scattered houses along North End Lane which wound its way from Walham Green to the trunk road linking the parishes of Hammersmith and Kensington. The main topographical feature was Counter's Creek, a tributary of the Thames River, rising in Kensal Green, which marked the parish boundary. Among the notable residents who had settled in this quiet rural retreat were Samuel Richardson, Samuel Foote, Francesco Bartolozzi, Sir John Lillie and then in the late 19th century, the artists Edward and Georgiana Burne-Jones. The quiet of North End was sorely disturbed from 1824 onwards when local landowner William Edwardes, 2nd Baron Kensington, along with several others, decided to