The murders in Praed Street

Praed Street is not at any time one of London’s brighter thoroughfares. Certainly it ends upon a note of hope, terminating as it does on the fringe of the unquestioned respectability of Bayswater, but for the rest of its course it is frankly lamentable. Narrow, bordered by small and often furtive shops, above which the squalid looking upper parts are particularly uninviting, it can never have been designed as more than a humble annexe of its more prosperous parent, the Edgware Road. And then, for no apparent reason, the Great Western Railway planted its terminus upon it, and Praed Street found itself called upon to become a main artery of traffic.