Kensington High Street Shops: A Shopping Guide
This was once the most glamorous shopping street in London. It is now a very good high street in the shell of something grander, and knowing that is the key to enjoying it.
Three department stores and a roof garden
From the late nineteenth century until the mid 1970s this street carried three full department stores at once: Barkers, Derry & Toms and Pontings. No other high street in London supported that.
Derry & Toms opened in 1860 and rebuilt in 1933 as a seven-storey Art Deco building by Bernard George. Between 1936 and 1938 the landscape architect Ralph Hancock laid out a garden on the roof: an acre and a half, three separate gardens, five hundred species of plant, a stream, fountains, ducks and flamingos. It cost twenty-five thousand pounds and it was the largest roof garden in Europe.
In 1973 the building became Big Biba, the most extravagant shop London had seen, and the Art Deco was pushed further still. It closed in 1975. Kensington Market, three floors of independent stalls that opened in 1967, lasted until 2000. Barkers held on until January 2006 and then closed after 135 years.
What is left is the architecture, and it is worth looking up at. The shopping underneath it is more ordinary now, and there is no point pretending otherwise.
What it is good for
One straight line, everything on it, done in an hour. If you know what you need and want to buy it without a project, this street beats Carnaby and the Kings Road comfortably.
The Barkers building
Whole Foods Market
The largest branch in the country, in the Art Deco shell of a department store that ran for 135 years.
The main run, east to west
Urban Outfitters
The anchor at the younger end of the street.
Reiss
Tailoring that behaves itself.
The Kooples
Parisian, and a reliable stop for a jacket.
Sweaty Betty
Activewear, and the Kensington branch is a large one.
Neal's Yard Remedies
Organic skincare in the blue bottles, from a British herbalist that started in Covent Garden.
It is a high street, and the names on it are names you know. That is the trade: less discovery than Newburgh Quarter, far less walking than the Kings Road, and you will be finished before lunch.
Look up
What is worth most on Kensington High Street costs nothing. The Derry & Toms frontage, the Barkers building, the metalwork and the relief panels are all still there above the shopfronts, and almost nobody shopping below ever raises their eyes to them.
How do I get there?
- Nearest tube
- High Street Kensington, on the District and Circle lines, which comes out directly onto the street.
- When to go
- Any weekday, when it is calm and you can move at your own pace. Saturdays are busier and the street is much the same either way.
- How long you need
- An hour to ninety minutes. It is one line and you will not get lost.
- What else is close
- The Design Museum is at the western end, Kensington Palace and Kensington Gardens are five minutes north, and Holland Park is a short walk west.
Go, and give it an hour
Kensington High Street is the most efficient shopping in west London and the handsomest street to do it on. Both of those are worth something.
It is still an hour on a tube and an hour back.
STREET brings the street's independents to your door. Browse what they actually have, buy from the ones nearest you, and it comes to you instead. Kensington is in our first launch area.
Go when you can. We will cover the weeks you cannot.
Join the waitlistNearby guides
Kings Road is fifteen minutes south. Notting Hill is north, past Holland Park.