Venues in St John's Wood

St John’s Wood takes its name from the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, who held the land from the twelfth century, and it was farmland until the Eyre estate began building on it in 1809. What went up was new: detached and semi-detached villas in their own gardens instead of terraces, the first development in London planned that way, and the model every suburb afterwards copied. St John’s Wood Church, by Thomas Hardwick, opened in 1814. The streets north of Regent’s Park still read as that plan, stucco and brick behind hedges.

Two institutions give the district its name outside London. Lord’s has stood here since 1814, when Thomas Lord moved his cricket ground for the third time to escape a rent increase; Thomas Verity’s Pavilion of 1889 is listed Grade II*, and the Media Centre of 1999 was the first all-aluminium semi-monocoque building anywhere. Abbey Road Studios opened in November 1931 behind the front of a Georgian townhouse as the first purpose-built recording studios in the world, and both the building and the crossing outside it were listed Grade II in 2010.

The High Street keeps a village scale of cafés and small shops, and the green is unusually close: Regent’s Park is across the road, Primrose Hill a walk east, and Lord’s itself is private lawn in the middle of it. For access, St John’s Wood is on the Jubilee line one stop from Baker Street, Marylebone station is a few minutes south, and the West End is inside ten minutes — which makes the district far more central than its quiet reads.