In fact the “improvements,” with the new roads as well as the changes in transportation, had a general and profound effect upon the nature of the city. As one historian of London, Donald Olsen, has put it, in The Growth of Victorian London, “The nineteenth century saw the systematic sorting out of London into single-purpose, homogenous, specialised neighbourhoods … Strict social segregation became a prerequisite for success in any new development.” In addition, “the shift from multi-purpose to single-purpose neighbourhoods reflected the pervasive move towards professionalisation and specialisation in all aspects of nineteenth century thought and activity.” The generalisation is perhaps too broad, since there continued to be areas where rich and poor were obliged to mingle, but it hits upon an important truth. It is the truth which Francis Place in part expressed, albeit unwittingly. The vices of the poor could no longer be seen, and therefore there must have been an improvement. In fact they had departed into areas of misery created by the slum clearances of the new city. They had moved “behind the scenes” of the newly dramatised London.
CHAPTER 56
Nothing Quite Like It
Of London areas, there is no end. The vibrancy of Walthamstow, the mournful decay of Pimlico and Mornington Crescent, the confusion of Stoke Newington, the intense and energetic air of Brixton, the watery gloom of Wapping, the bracing gentility of Muswell Hill, the excitement of Canary Wharf, the eccentricity of Camden Town, the fearfulness of Stepney, the lassitude of Limehouse, can all be mentioned in the vast oration of London. Every Londoner has his or her own favourite location, whether it be Victoria Park in Hackney or rolling Long Lane in Southwark, although it must also be admitted that most inhabitants of the city rarely know or visit anywhere beyond their own neighbourhood. Most citizens identify themselves in terms of their immediate locale.
There is a passage in G.K. Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill where he envisaged a city with its own assertive districts as, for example, “Clapham with a city guard. Wimbledon with a city wall. Surbiton tolling a bell to raise its citizens. West Hampstead going into battle with its own banner.” Of the eponymous region of the book, he writes, “There has never been anything in the world absolutely like Notting Hill. There will never be anything quite like it to the crack of doom.” In this, at least, he will be proved correct.
Where Notting Hill Gate now stands, a beacon was situated in the Roman period; part of a Roman sarcophagus was found in St. John’s Vicarage off Ladbroke Grove. The district’s name comes from a band of Saxons, “sons of Cnotta.” For 1,700 years it remained in open countryside, with a reputation for springs and healthy air; there were in the eighteenth century, however, colonies of brick-makers and Irish pig-keepers apparently marring the sylvan peace of the neighbourhood. Complaints were lodged but nothing ever done. One of the peculiar characteristics of Notting Hill is that it was attached to the city, but not of it, and so was characterised by a “mixed” atmosphere at once urban and suburban. Hence its ambivalent air.
In the 1850s, for example, the east end of Notting Hill High Street was inhabited by “private people, foreigners, adventurers, or respectable confidential employés of west-end commercial houses,” while almost fifty years later Percy Fitzgerald complained that the grand terraces and houses were “mixed up” with “flashy shops and all the vulgar incidents of traffic.” A racecourse was opened in 1837 where Kensington Park Gardens and Ladbroke Grove now meet; it was known as the Hippodrome, and was advertised as “a racing emporium more extensive and attractive than Ascot or Epsom.” It was not a success and, from the 1840s onward, houses and villas were being constructed over the entire area.
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.