Paddington Waterside

A similar switch from rail to road in the second half of the twentieth century left the Paddington goods yards redundant by the early 1980s.

One Kingdom Street is a 260,000 sq ft (24,000 m2) office building completed in February 2008 and occupied by Misys, Statoil, MWB and Vodafone.

[15] In January 2010, Westminster City Council granted detailed planning permission for the final phase of the development, Four and Five Kingdom Street.

[15] Paddington Arm British Waterways intends to encourage activity on and around the canal north of the Westway up to Little Venice, with floating galleries, cafés and restaurants.

[18] An eight-storey office block of 105,000 sq ft (9,800 m2) has been built at 2 Eastbourne Terrace and is the London headquarters of the Rio Tinto Group.

[21] Westlink Global Investment Ltd, 60% owned by AMDB Bhd of Malaysia, paid £50.5m for a net rental yield of 8.65% based on the 94% occupancy at the time.

[27] The Richard Rogers Partnership originally designed the latter as three towers of 24, 32 and 40 floors rising to 164m, but the planners imposed a height limit of 100 metres (330 ft).

[28] The revised scheme comprised six linked blocks of 30 storeys totalling 860,000 sq ft (80,000 m2) of mixed-use space,[28] but the project was discarded when it looked like the site would be needed by the Health Campus (see below).

[29] The Health Campus scheme collapsed in 2005 and in February 2006 the Paddington Development Corporation – now European Land and Property Ltd – submitted a new planning application.

[38] Sandwiched between the Westway and the canal basin, the 1.5-hectare site of the former North Westminster Community School was omitted from the Paddington Special Policy Area as it was expected to remain in use for education.

The planning brief proposed that "around 80% of gross internal area delivered on the site should be allocated for residential use, with public open space, and supporting active uses that provide local employment.

"[39]: pp.7–8 In April 2012 Westminster City Council sold the site to Amwaj Property Limited, of Bahrain, which commissioned London-based Assael Architecture to design a residentially-oriented mixed-use development, the first phase of which was scheduled for completion in 2015 at an estimated cost of £71 million.

[40] St Mary's is a major teaching hospital with a long tradition of biomedical research, from the first synthesis of heroin to the discovery of penicillin.

In October 2000, the London Regional Office of the NHS approved a plan for a Paddington Health Campus that would replace three run-down hospitals – St Marys, the Royal Brompton and Harefield.

[41] The initial cost was estimated at £411m at 2005 prices with completion in 2006,[41] to be financed by PFI,[42] but it became apparent that the scheme was too big for the original St Mary's site.

[41] Various locations north of the canal basin were investigated but the scheme was finally abandoned in May 2005 after costs had spiralled to £894m and the completion date put back to 2013.

[41] £15m was spent on the project, leading a member of the Commons Public Accounts Committee to describe it as "an object lesson in how not to build hospitals....a shambles of the first order",[42] and a colleague called it "incompetence on a massive scale".

[44] The Royal Mail closed their sorting office in Praed Street in March 2010 and moved the counter service to West End Quay.