Cows on the café

GUILAN IS A NEW cafe on the corner of Moscow Road and St Petersburgh Place in London’s Bayswater. I have walked past the building numerous times over the past more than 25 years, but until today I missed seeing something on the building.

Above the ground floor windows there are a number of
sculpted heads of cattle. I had never noticed these before.

On looking at a map produced in the 1950s, I discovered that
the building was then a dairy. An older map revealed that it was ‘The Aylesbury
Dairy’. A search on the Internet informed me that this building was the head
office of the company, which had another branch not far away. So,  the cattle heads are a souvenir of the
building’s time as a dairy.

The new café in the former dairy is across the road from
Aghia Sofia, a Greek Orthodox church. The cafe is elegant and serves good
coffee and tasty pastries including a croissant flavoured with za’atar. I have
no idea from which dairy the milk is supplied to Guilan, but you can be sure it
is not the Aylesbury Dairy.