Pubs with Rooms in Notting Hill, Bayswater and Little Venice

Notting Hill, Bayswater and Little Venice run into one another north of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. Notting Hill is the one with the pastel stucco terraces and Portobello Road Market; Bayswater, a few streets south, has the long Victorian terraces around Queensway; and Little Venice, to the north, is where the Grand Union Canal meets the Regent’s Canal, with moored narrowboats and a towpath walk towards Camden.

Staying here means a residential neighbourhood with good shops and restaurants rather than a tourist centre, and the pubs reflect that. The Princess Royal on Hereford Road is a Victorian pub, built in 1841 according to CAMRA and restored by Cubitt House in 2022, with four boutique rooms. The Hayden, on Westbourne Grove, has eight rooms above its bar. The Waterway is a canal-side restaurant and bar with three rooms; it is the only one of the three on the water.

None of the three is a heritage coaching inn in the way a Young’s or Fuller’s house elsewhere in London can be, so if the building matters to you, the Princess Royal’s 1841 pedigree is the strongest of the group. All are a short walk from a Tube station, and Paddington’s rail links, including the airport services, are close by.

The neighbourhood’s best-known stories are about people rather than pubs, and they are mostly well documented. Westbourne Grove, where the Hayden stands, is where William Whiteley opened his drapery shop in 1863 and went on to call himself “The Universal Provider”; he was shot dead at his store in 1907 by a man who claimed to be his illegitimate son, a claim Whiteley’s lawyers denied. Notting Hill Carnival grew out of the aftermath of the 1958 race riots: the activist Claudia Jones organised an indoor Caribbean carnival in 1959, and the street festival of 1966 led by Rhaune Laslett and the steel-pan player Russell Henderson is usually taken as the start of the outdoor event, though historians treat the two as related rather than a single line. Down in Little Venice, even the name is argued over: it is often credited to Robert Browning, who lived in Warwick Crescent from 1862, but Lord Kinross claimed in 1966 that Byron got there first. We have not found a pub in this area with a ghost, a tunnel or a famous-drinker story that stands up to a source, so treat any you hear in the bar as pub talk.