A Real Insider's Guide To Notting Hill
Forget the other guides. This is the real deal from a true insider.
Ever since the film ‘Notting Hill’ was released, guides this colourful London neighbourhood have abounded. I’ve read a few of them. Most of them are pretty feeble.
I know they are feeble because very few people know the area better than I do. My father worked in a greengrocer’s shop in Notting Hill Gate when I was growing up and I helped him out as a Saturday boy. In those days I toured the avenues of Holland Park and Kensington as well as ‘The Gate’. And if you went too far south from Notting Hill tube station - outside of the market itself - you might was well have erected a sign saying ‘here there be monsters’. Because it was rough in those days - really rough. All Saint’s Road was more or less a no go area unless you were a drug dealer. Many of the houses were run down or sometimes decrepit. There was real poverty.
How things have changed in the 50-odd years I have been frequenting the area. Although there are still large public housing estates towards the North of Notting Hill - properly known as ‘Notting Dale’ or ‘Kensal Town’ - most of the area, though no longer fashionable in the way that Shoreditch or Peckham is now fasionable, is exteremely bougi.
I bought a flat in central Notting Hill -half way between the Gate and the Golborne Road - in 1983. A decade later, I was able to buy a house in a run down part north of the Westway. After ‘Notting Hill’ came out like many residents, I cashed in and moved to Kensal Rise, the next town to the North. But for the last 40 years I have been walking up and down my beloved Portobello Road, watching the changes and the people, still full of an emotion that almost amounts to worship when it comes to my favourite part of London.
So what can I share with you about this amazing neighbourhood? Let’s start just behind where my dad’s shop was on Holland Park avenue. This is probably the least interesting part of ‘Notting Hill’ - which imaginatively runs all the way down to the Golborne Road in the North and the canal in Kensal Town. But there are one or two places still worth visiting.
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