Paddington, London
Paddington is an area within the City of Westminster, in central London. Formerly a metropolitan borough, it was integrated with Westminster and Greater London in 1965. Three important landmarks of the district are Paddington station, designed by the celebrated engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel and opened in 1847; St Mary's Hospital; and Paddington Green Police Station (the most important high-security police station in the United Kingdom).
A major project called Paddington Waterside aims to regenerate former railway and canal land between 1998 and 2018, and the area is seeing many new developments.
The earliest extant references to Padington, historically a part of Middlesex, appear in documentation of purported 10th-century land grants to the monks of Westminster by Edgar the Peaceful as confirmed by Archbishop Dunstan. However, the documents' provenance is much later and likely to have been forged after the 1066 Norman conquest. There is no mention of the place (or Westbourne or Knightsbridge) in the Domesday Book of 1086. It has been reasonably speculated that a Saxon settlement was located around the intersection of the northern and western Roman roads, corresponding with the Edgware Road (Watling Street) and the Harrow and Uxbridge Roads. A more reliable 12th-century document cited by the cleric Isaac Maddox (1697–1759) establishes that part of the land was held by brothers "Richard and William de Padinton".
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