Maids Guest Rooms occupies the upper floors above and beside the Original Maids of Honour tea rooms at 288 Kew Road, a business Alfred Nashbar Newens opened on the site in 1850. Newens passed the shop to his son John and daughter Kathleen in the 1920s, and the building was badly damaged by bombing during the Second World War, leaving, according to a 1947 surveyor's report, little more than rubble around a blackened bakery oven. John's son Peter led the postwar rebuilding, installing new gas ovens and remodelling the Mock Tudor shopfront that still stands. The guest rooms themselves are self-contained, spread across the first floor of the original early eighteenth-century building and an adjoining family residence, and guests can take breakfast, lunch or afternoon tea in the rooms downstairs.
Surveyed