August is Proms month in London, with a rich variety of music for every taste live at the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington, culminating in a triumphant blast of sound at the Proms in the Park concert in Hyde Park on September 9. The terracotta and marble sweep of the Royal Albert Hall is a central part of Kensington's enduring Victorian architectural and cultural legacy of stucco terraces, garden squares, museums, universities, Royal parks and palaces. This month's walk explores Kensington and neighbouring Holland Park, strolling through quiet streets and mews, watching cricketers and swimmers in the parks, before ending up back at the Albert Hall in time for an evening meal and concert.

Highlights

Royal Albert Hall
Linley Sambourne House
Holland Park
Kensington Palace Gardens
Kensington Palace
Kensington Gardens
The Serpentine
Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain
Serpentine Gallery
Albert Memorial


Type of walk: circular

Distance: 4.75 miles

Time taken: two hours approx

Weekdays are better for a quiet walk through the park, although London is much quieter in August generally, with many people away on holiday. Backstage tours of the Royal Albert Hall take place Friday to Tuesday and Kensington Palace is open daily. The Linley Sambourne House (see below) is open for pre-booked tours at weekends and during the week by appointment between March and December.

Start and finish: Royal Albert Hall, Kensington Gore. The closest tube stations are South Kensington (district, circle and piccadilly lines) and Knightsbridge (piccadilly line). From South Kensington tube, follow signs through the tunnel to Museums and turn left into Exhibition Road, then left again into Kensington Gore. From Knightsbridge tube, cross Brompton Road to Knightsbridge, the road which runs parallel to Kensington Gardens past Knightsbridge Barracks. This road becomes Kensington Gore and the Albert Hall is on your left.

The Royal Albert Hall was finished in 1871, funded partly by profits from the Great Exhibition of 1851 and partly by selling leases on concert seats. The lettering round the top of the large circular hall reflects Prince Albert's lofty intellectual ambitions: "This hall was erected for the advancement of the arts and sciences and industry of all nations…" More than 150,000 performances have take place in the huge domed hall since it opened.

Facing the front of the hall, turn right and left just before the Royal College of Art into the continuation of Kensington Gore. The ornate, painted building on your right looking like a baroque organ casing is the former headquarters of the Royal College of Organists. Follow the road round to the back of the Albert Imperial College Hall until you see a wide stone staircase with the Royal College of Music ahead of you, housed in a handsome red brick Victorian building.

Turn right into Prince Consort Road, past the laboratories of Imperial College on your left into Queen's Gate. This is classic Kensington architecture, a wide street lined with tall white stucco houses with pillared porches. Turning right into Queen's Gate Terrace, you pass more of the same. Most of these houses are now (expensive) flats but once they were lived in by wealthy single families, whose servants and carriages were housed in the mews streets behind the large houses. Cross Gloucester Road at the zebra crossing and continue straight ahead to Victoria Grove.

This and neighbouring back streets form a small enclave of beautifully proportioned early and mid Victorian houses, on a more human scale than the grandeur of Queen's Gate. The small gardens are bright with summer flowers and wisteria winds round porches and the streets make for pefect urban walking, well away from the busy Cromwell and Gloucester Roads. At the first junction, turn left into Launceston Place and continue into Cornwall Gardens, a square of more pillared-porch houses overlooking a private garden square. Houses or flats which come with a residents' key to a garden square are a sought-after commodity in densely populated Kensington.

Turn right into Cornwall Gardens, keeping the garden on your left and admiring the exuberance of the carved plaster, mansard roofs, large bay windows and balconies of the mid-Victorian houses ahead of you. At the end of Cornwall Gardens, look for an archway but do not go through it. Instead, turn left then look for a path to the right with an iron fence and metal bollards where the road bends round to your left. This is Lexham Walk, a pedestrian cut-through to Lexham Gardens, another garden square. Follow the crescent of houses round to the right until you get to the junction of Marloes Road then turn right.

Take the next left, Stratford Road, past the Devonshire Arms pub. This is a good place to stop for a drink and something to eat, with plenty of seating outside on the terrace as well as inside. Alternatively, if you are planning a picnic in Holland Park, a short way further along the route, the small shops and cafes in Stratford Road include The Pie Man delicatessen for tempting snacks.

After stocking up, turn right into Allen Street and continue up to Kensington High Street, which has a wide choice of shops and restaurants for a meal or picnic shop. Cross at the pedestrian crossing and turn into Argyll Street, then take the second left into Stafford Terrace.

About three quarters of the way down this quiet residential street on the left, look for a raised ground floor bay window at no.18 with a glass display case set into it to show a flower arrangement. This is the Linley Sambourne House, originally the home of Edward Linley Sambourne, a cartoonist with Punch magazine, and his family, who moved in in 1874. The house has been preserved almost exactly as it was when they family lived there, with original sanitary fittings, drawing room with gas lighting and dark hangings and bedrooms with washstands and chamber pots. The house is well worth a visit although you need to book in advance.

At the end of Stafford Terrace, cut left and immediately right into Phillimore Walk, which opens into Holland Park. Turn right again up the wide path into the park. Holland Park is the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea's largest and its 55 acres of green space, woodland, orangery and open air theatre are a haven for Londoners without access to a Kensington garden square The park is full of mothers with buggies, joggers and children watching the resident peacocks and in summer, Opera Holland Park performs open air operas under a canopy at the park's theatre, another musical treat for a summer's evening.

Continue up the path past the Youth Hostel on your left and look for an exit to your right between the buildings of Holland Park School to Campden Hill. At the end of the road turn left into Campden Hill Road and continue onto a right turning into Kensington Place. The small cottagey Victorian terraces in this grid of attractive streets are collectively known as Hillgate Village by local estate agents, although there is nothing small scale about the prices of the yellow, pink and blue painted cottages.

Cross Kensington Church Street, lined with exclusive galleries and antique shops, and continue along Kensington Mall to Palace Gardens Terrace, where you turn left to reach Notting Hill. Turn right and right again into Kensington Palace Gardens, instantly recognisable by its stone-pillared gates, royal crest above the entrance and gate house to flag down undesirables. This street, owned by the Crown Estate, contains London's most expensive house, sold to steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal in 2004 for £70 million after several years on the market, and the street is one of the most expensive residential streets in the world. Most of the other houses are embassies, designed in an entertainingly mad frenzy of different styles, imitating everything from Moorish domes to French chateaux, alongside Italianate columns and pediments and red brick Queen Anne.

Look for a turning to the left into Kensington Palace opposite the Romanian embassy and follow the path past the Palace into Kensington Gardens, veering diagonally left up the path to the Round Pond where children sail their boats and nannies try not to fall asleep in the sun. Follow the pond round to the left and take the right hand path, walking towards a granite obelisk ahead of you which commemorates John Speke, the explorer. Keep walking past the obelisk until you reach a set of fountains and the Serpentine, the curved lake which divides Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. Turn right down the path next to the Serpentine and enjoy the walk back through the park with the lake on your left until you pass under a road bridge and arrive at the Serpentine ahead of you, ideal for a paddle or swim or just an al fresco snack.

On your right is the Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain, a large circle of stone with small fountains flowing into channels round a grassy centre. The fountain, opened in 2004, has been dogged with controversy over the choice of design and maintenance problems as the drainage system failed and turned the earth into a sea of mud. But it seems to be working, for now at least, and is a welcome place to cool off your feet on a hot day.

Follow the path to the right of the memorial, where a roundel set into the ground marks the route of the Princess of Wales Memorial Walk. Keep straight on past a car park on your left to reach a road. Cross and continue through Kensington Gardens, taking a path diagonally left.

This leads you to the Serpentine Gallery with its summer pavilion, covered by an inflatable canopy which will float across Hyde Park until October. Walk past the gallery on your right and follow signs to the Albert Memorial, an exuberant piece of gothic Victoriana with a gold figure of Prince Albert seated inside a painted canopy surrounded with stone carvings and topped with a gold cross. The walk ends at the Royal Albert Hall on the other side of the road.

Multimedia

Related Internet Links

• Map: print out a map of the Kensington walk

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