Adjacent houses have
consequently been adapted for the offices, and there is continual need
for further accommodation. There are eight platform lines, and the
platforms themselves are 780 feet in length. The daily passenger trains
number from 250 to 300, and with the addition of excursion trains in the
season the total daily average has reached 350. The diurnal number of
passengers is estimated at 14,000, but high-water mark has been touched
between 40,000 and 50,000. Twenty-five tons of news parcels are
despatched from Paddington in one day, and nearly 3,000 mail-bags and
parcels-post packages pass through the station in the same time, besides
about 5,000 milk-churns. The above figures give some indication of the
enormous traffic at this great terminus. The army of workers employed
numbers 2,000, exclusive of the large clerical staff employed in the
general department. The Great Western Hotel in a Renaissance style
fronts Praed Street. It was built from 1850 to 1852, and its frontage is
nearly 89 yards in length, and it is connected with the station by means
of a covered way. Covered ways also connect the station with Praed
Street and Bishop's Road Stations of the Metropolitan Railway.

In No. 19, Warwick Crescent, Robert Browning lived for five-and-twenty
years, a fact recorded by a tablet of the Society of Arts. He came here
in 1862, broken down by the death of his wife, and remained until a
threatened railway near the front of the house--an innovation never
carried out--drove him away. We are now once more in the region where
the name of Westbourne is freely used. There is Westbourne Terrace and
Square, Westbourne Park Crescent and Terrace Road. Near to Park Crescent
in Chichester Place is a Jewish synagogue of red brick, with ornate
stone carving over doors and windows. Next door is a curiously built
Primitive Methodist chapel, with bands of differently coloured bricks in
relief. St. Mary Magdalene's Church and schools stand at the corner of
Cirencester Street. A temporary church was first opened in 1865, and the
real building in 1868. This was the work of G. E. Street, R.A., and is a
compactly built church of dark-red brick, with apse and very high spire,
202 feet in height. It stands in rather a peculiar situation at the
junction of three or four roads, and suits the position well.

On July 13, 1872, while workmen were still busy with the roofing, the
church caught fire. The damage, however, was not great. The ch