London: The Biography

So by degrees it assumed its present shape, but not before a cycle of speculations and bankruptcies lent the neighbourhood another of its characteristic tones. In the 1820s James Ladbroke tried but failed to develop the area; in the boom of the 1840s great developments were undertaken before the speculators went bankrupt in the bust of the 1850s. In the 1860s Notting Hill was described in Building News as “a graveyard of buried hopes … naked carcasses, crumbling decorations, fractured walls, slimy cement. All who touch them lose heart and money by the venture.” Ever since that period, there has been a persistent pattern of decay and recovery. In the 1870s, for example, there was a resurgence of activity and habitation but by the next decade some of the imposing novelty of the site had diminished. As urban development began to hesitate and falter at Earl’s Court, always a wilderness, there was a resurgent tide in favour of Notting Hill which gathered strength in the 1890s. By the early decades of the twentieth century, however, the stucco mansions of Kensington Park Gardens and its environs once more began to fade and peel. The great houses were turned into flats by the 1930s, less than a century after they had been erected, and in the place of what was once termed “the upper middle class” came “Viennese professors and Indian students and bed-sitter business girls.” This description is by Osbert Lancaster, who lived in the area during the slow decline of its “Edwardian propriety.”

In the late 1940s and the 1950s, however, Notting Hill declined into “slumdom” with broken windows and racketeering landlords. During the 1950s immigrants from the West Indies congregated in the area, like the Irish before them, which in turn led to riots; in the 1960s and early 1970s, precisely because of this mixed and heterogeneous past, it became a haven for those who, like the hippies of the period, required a kind of louche informality in which to pursue their lives. The peeling streets, the grimy balconies, were combined with the street-market along the Portobello Road to produce an atmosphere of happy dereliction. In the 1980s there were festivals. Here, in miniature, we see the passage of many different London cultures.

Then again, in one of the strange and instinctive processes of urban life, the conditions of the area seemed slowly to change. The harbinger of that change might be found in 1967 when large areas of Notting Hill were protected by a Conservation Act, so that the original streets of the 1840s and 1850s became privileged territories beyond the reach of speculators and developers. By the late 1970s this special status began to attract back the wealthy Londoners who had deserted the neighbourhood fifty years before. The area was itself gradually restored to its former state of lambent stucco; to walk down Kensington Park Gardens in 2000 is to experience that wide thoroughfare as it had emerged 150 years before.

The area in recent years has acquired a certain solidity and strength of purpose; it is no longer as fluid and as heterogeneous as once it was. Situated between the bewildering cosmopolitanism of Queensway, where the Tower of Babel might once more be constructed, and the mournful region of Shepherd’s Bush, it is an enclave of quiet urban solidity. Accepting its past, Notting Hill has incorporated it within its being, so that now the summer Notting Hill Carnival is a truly mixed urban celebration. Of course there are still areas of relative poverty and deprivation within its bounds-Trellick Tower of the Kensal Estate, for example, dominates the northern skyline and lends an atmosphere of old and poor communal living to the market of Golborne Road within its shadow. Here, too, are the first intimations of the maze of West Kilburn to the north of the Harrow Road. But Notting Hill itself has retrieved its charm and good humour, principally because it has come to terms with its destiny.

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