Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 02/07/2026 23:44:00

When it opened in 1923, the Bluebird Garage at 330-350 King's Road was claimed to be the largest garage in Europe: 50,000 square feet designed by architect Robert Sharp for the Bluebird Motor Company, with room for 300 cars, 7,000 square feet of workshops and separate lounges for ladies, owners and chauffeurs. Land-speed legend Sir Malcolm Campbell was connected with the operation, holding franchises for Itala, Ballot and later Chrysler cars, and the Art Deco complex is now Grade II listed. The garage itself closed as early as 1927, and the building spent decades as an ambulance station before Sir Terence Conran's group transformed it in 1997 into the "Bluebird Gastrodrome" - a food store, cafe, bar, restaurant and private dining rooms. Refurbished and relaunched in 2007, it is today operated by D&D London as Bluebird Chelsea, one of west London's best-known all-day dining destinations. The first-floor restaurant sits in the old showroom under dramatic glass ceiling panels framed in industrial steel, arranged around a circular central bar; the menu mixes British and European classics. Downstairs, the cafe and forecourt courtyard are prime King's Road people-watching territory, and four private dining rooms handle everything from board lunches to wedding parties. The former garage floor has housed retail in various guises over the years, including the high-end Shop at Bluebird. For visitors, the building is a destination in its own right: one of London's finest surviving pieces of motoring architecture, five minutes from the Saatchi Gallery and Sloane Square. The Campbell connection ran deeper than branding: he held the Itala and Ballot franchises at the garage and raced both marques as a form of advertising, adding the agency for the newly founded Chrysler company in 1925. After the ambulance-station decades the main hall even spent the mid-1990s as a fashion market before Conran's conversion, and the old garage floor was later an experimental Sainsbury's concept store before becoming the high-end Shop at Bluebird.