What did Flora Tea Gardens and Skittle Alley Claude Duval do at 66 Bayswater Road?

The Story

# 66 Bayswater Road: The Swan's Final Chapter Standing at 66 Bayswater Road, you're looking at the last surviving piece of what was once Flora Tea Gardens and Skittle Alley—a sprawling Georgian pleasure ground now reduced to a single public house, The Swan, which has occupied this exact spot for over three centuries since at least 1721. This nondescript corner held a grim historical significance as a coaching inn strategically positioned along the route from London's prisons to Tyburn Gallows (now Marble Arch), making it the final drinking establishment where condemned prisoners would take their last drinks of freedom before execution. It was allegedly here, in this very building, that Claude Duval—the notorious French highwayman who had terrorized travelers on the London to Edinburgh Road throughout the 1660s—ordered his final drink in 1670, hours before he himself was hanged at Tyburn, a victim of the very gallows that would become his monument in infamy. The Swan thus became an unexpected keeper of London's darker history: not a place of gaiety and gardens anymore, but a threshold between the living and the dead, a last refuge for rogues and rebels facing their final reckoning.