Barfett Street forms part of the Queens Park Estate, built by the Artisans, Labourers & General Dwellings Company.
The Artisans Company’s first project was Shaftesbury Park, a development of 1,200 two-storey houses covering 42.5 acres built in 1872 on the site of a former pig farm in Battersea. The success of Shaftesbury Park led to the construction of Queen’s Park, built in 1874 on a far more ambitious scale on 76 acres of land to the west of London, adjacent to the railway line out of Paddington (Queen’s Park station opened in 1879), purchased from All Souls College, Oxford.
The architecture of that estate of some 2000 small houses is distinctively Gothic-revival, with polychrome brickwork, pinnacles and turrets along the bigger roads.
Barfett Street was originally called “B Street” since the Estate had street names of numbers and letters: Avenues 1-6 and streets A-P.
