The Tabard, Chiswick

The block, with a row of seven gables in its roof, was designed by Norman Shaw in 1880 as part of the community focus of the Bedford Park garden suburb.

[1][2] The block is near the corner with Acton Green, facing St Michael and All Angels, Bedford Park, built at the same time as the community's church.

[4][3] The essayist Ian Fletcher writes that the row of seven gables mentioned is presumably Staple Inn, Holborn, but that Shaw probably drew the "heavily projecting bays" from Sparrowe's House, Ipswich.

According to Historic England, the Bedford Park buildings were "highly influential" on later suburbs, and were "widely imitated" both across Britain and in the United States.

Stamp saw it as significant that the pub's name evoked "Chaucer and Olde England", while the building looked nothing like "a contemporary gin palace".

[1] The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner described the Tabard as "especially attractive, with tile-hung gables and very original shallow-curved, completely glazed bay-windows".

[9] The pub, depicted by Thomas Erat Harrison, was among the buildings celebrated in an 1882 illustrated book Bedford Park on the then-fashionable garden suburb.

[1] The poet and campaigner for Victorian era buildings John Betjeman wrote that The Tabard was a place where "men could play the clavichord to ladies in tussore dresses and where supporters of William Morris could learn of early Socialism".