Europa House

It’s come to my attention that I’ve never posted about the first two months we lived in London. We landed at Heathrow in December 2005. However, I didn’t start writing this blog until February the following year. As a result, our early days as expats were never captured here for posterity.  

The blog was inspired by Michael Williams, a friend who’d moved to London a few months earlier than Garry and I. Over coffee one day, I complained about the challenge of keeping everyone up to date with our antics. You’d write to someone one week, talk to someone else by phone a week later, email someone else the week after and so on. Before you knew it, you couldn’t recall who’d been told what about our unfolding adventure in London.

Mike explained that he’d solved the problem by creating this fancy new-fangled thing called a blog. Now anyone could visit his online updates and be brought up to speed at any time. I loved the idea, and hence this blog was born. However, its genesis came several months after we arrived in London leaving a gap in its historical record. This retrospective post, written in September 2026, attempts to rectify this unfortunate omission.

Garry and I flew in from Amman, Jordon shortly after 11:00am on Tuesday, 13 December 2005. My company had given me a relocation budget for the move. We used these funds to pack up our home and relocate ourselves across the globe. Some of it also paid for temporary accommodation until we found ourselves a permanent place to live.

Enda, an Irish friend in Sydney, who’d lived in London for many years, recommended the area around Little Venice as a potential home base. We followed his advice, and after a little internet sleuthing, I booked us into temporary accommodation at Europa House, an elegant Regency townhouse complex offering long-stay serviced apartments. It was less than ten minutes’ walk from the canals of Little Venice. From here you’d walk another ten minutes straight into Paddington Station.

We initially booked for ten nights, followed by a week away, and then a second month-long booking until late January. Months earlier we’d made plans to join my brother and his family in Austria for Christmas, our first-ever white Christmas. We flew to Munich on 23 December and returned to London on 28 December in time for our first New Year's Eve in the UK.

We booked a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment. However, the folks at Europa House took us under their wing. Much to our surprise (and delight), they upgraded us into a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment, and not only that, they gave us the largest and most impressive of these apartments.  I've highlighted its location in the Google Street View image above.

The apartment featured a large living room that followed the building’s elegantly curving façade. The additional space made it feel more like a home and less like a hotel. The second bedroom conveniently served as a handy storage room for our travel luggage, and a growing collection of bits and pieces we began acquiring for our life in London. 

Months earlier, we’d packed the entire contents of our Sydney apartment into a 40-foot container, along with Garry’s Saab sedan. While we spent two months on sabbatical, our household effects quietly made their way to Europe. Hence, we only needed a place equipped well enough to get us through our first six or seven weeks before everything arrived. As an aside, the cleaner we eventually hired to look after us in Swiss Cottage was working part-time at Europa House.

Guests at Europa House had access to three acres of private gardens behind the building.  Our main bedroom actually overlooked the grounds. However, in the midst of winter, it would be fair to say we never really took advantage of them, or the view from our bedroom, for that matter. Europe House kindly reserved the same apartment for our entire stay. Thanks to light bookings at that time of year (i.e. the week of Christmas), they told us to leave spare clothing and other loose ends in the apartment while we holidayed in Austria. 

While I worked and travelled for business, Garry got to work sorting out our new life. His first project was finding us a place to live. We initially focused on an area extending from Paddington and its surrounding area arcing east towards suburbs north of Regents Park. As you know, he eventually stumbled across a freshly renovated three-bedroom apartment on Fellows Road in Swiss Cottage, and the rest is history.

Our month living at Europa House was the perfect introduction to life in London. So much of the city is noisy, a little grimy and often crowded. By contrast, Maida Vale and nearby Little Venice were a quiet, green and elegant oasis. Every morning I’d walk to Paddington Station via Warrington Crescent, a street that gently curved towards the canal, lined on both sides by immaculate white Victorian stucco terraces. It was like living in a Hollywood movie.

We also had all manner of quirky local highlights, including the canals, Abbey Road, where the Beatles once immortalised a humble pedestrian crossing, and the hustle and bustle of Paddington Station. Although I must admit it wasn't the cheapest neighbourhood to live in. On our first day in London, while waiting for our apartment to become available, Garry and I walked into Paddington for lunch at a local gourmet burger joint. We were stunned after paying more than AUD 20 each for a humble burger. It was also our first lesson in avoiding currency conversions while living in London. Everything was expensive when converted to Australian dollars.

Our nearest supermarket was a Sainsbury's on Kilburn High Road, about a mile from Europa House. We could walk there in about 20 minutes.  However, the return journey laden with groceries was a little too much to walk. As a result, we'd often catch the tube one stop from Kilburn High Road to Maida Vale, a block north of our serviced apartment.  Hauling groceries on the tube was an eye-opening introduction to life in London for residents without a car. I don't recall ever dragging the weekly shop home on public transport before then.

One final note. Sadly, we never took any photos of the apartment and its surroundings. As a result, I've taken to the internet to source the images published here.