Kensington Park Gardens is a street in Notting Hill.
Kensington Park Gardens is a broad, open street, connecting
Ladbroke Grove to
Kensington Park Road at the apex of Notting Hill, with a magnificent vista to St John’s church at the western end. Both sides of the street back onto communal gardens, and St John’s Church was built on its chosen site to close the vista at the west end of the street.
The housing was built in the 1850s during the second great wave of construction on the Ladbroke estate. In the filthy atmosphere of London in the 19th century, a considerable premium was put on being high up, and the land on which Kensington Park Gardens now stands was amongst the most valuable on the estate. The street contains some of the most important and grandest houses in the Ladbroke area.
The original layout plan for the area and designs for the houses in Kensington Park Gardens had been drawn up by the Ladbroke family’s architect and surveyor Thomas Allason in 1849, but he died before it could be fully executed. The earliest phase of development, Nos. 1-9 (consecutive) on the south east end of the street, was most likely based on Thomas Allason’s original plans, but the final design for most of the terraced housing on Kensington Park Gardens was radically adapted by Thomas Allom, who took Allason’s place as architectural adviser to the estate.
The south side of the street consisted almost entirely of detached trios of villas, unusually for the Ladbroke estate, where terraces and pairs of semi-detached villas are the norm. All back onto
Ladbroke Square Garden. The north side is an extremely grand terrace, with a magnificent archway in the centre through to the Stanley Garden South communal garden.
Kensington Hippodrome The Kensington Hippodrome was a racecourse built in Notting Hill, London, in 1837, by entrepreneur John Whyte. Mercury Theatre The Mercury Theatre was situated at 2a Ladbroke Road, next to the Kensington Temple. St John’s, Notting Hill St John’s Notting Hill is a Victorian Anglican church built in 1845 in Lansdowne Crescent, Notting Hill. The Crown The Crown was situated at 57 Princedale Road. Arundel Gardens, W11 Arundel Gardens was built towards the end of the development of the Ladbroke Estate, in the early 1860s. Blenheim Crescent, W11 Blenheim Crescent one of the major thoroughfares in Notting Hill - indeed it features in the eponymous film. Callcott Street, W8 Callcott Street is a small street between Uxbridge Street and Hillgate Place. Clarendon Road, W11 Clarendon Road is one of the W11’s longest streets, running from Holland Park Avenue in the south to Dulford Street in the north. Codrington Mews, W11 This attractive L-shaped mews lies off Blenheim Crescent between Kensington Park Road and Ladbroke Grove. Cornwall Crescent, W11 Cornwall Crescent belongs to the third and final period of building on the Ladbroke estate. Elgin Crescent, W11 Elgin Crescent runs from Portobello Road west across Ladbroke Grove and then curls round to the south to join Clarendon Road. Horbury Crescent, W11 Horbury Crescent is a short half-moon shaped street between Ladbroke Road and Kensington Park Road. Ladbroke Square, W11 The huge Ladbroke Square communal garden is part communal garden accessed from the backs of the houses lining it and part traditional London Square with roads between the houses and the square. Ladbroke Terrace, W11 Ladbroke Terrace was one of the first streets to be created on the Ladbroke estate. Lansdowne Crescent, W11 Lansdowne Crescent has some of the most interesting and varied houses on the Ladbroke estate, as architects and builders experimented with different styles. Portland Road, W11 Portland Road is a street in Notting Hill, rich at one end and poor at the other. Pottery Lane, W11 Pottery Lane takes its name from the brickfields which were situated at the northern end of the street. Wilby Mews, W11 Wilby Mews was named after Benjamin Wilby, who was involved in several 19th century development schemes.
Notting Hill: A place whose fortunes have come, gone and come again...Notting Hill is a cosmopolitan district known as the location for the annual Notting Hill Carnival, and for being home to the Portobello Road Market.
The word
Notting might originate from a Saxon called
Cnotta with the
=ing part indicating "the place inhibited by the people of" - i.e. where Cnotta’s tribe lived. There was a farm called variously "Knotting-Bernes,", "Knutting-Barnes" or "Nutting-barns" and this name was transferred to the hill above it.
The area remained rural until the westward expansion of London reached Bayswater in the early 19th century. The main landowner in Notting Hill was the Ladbroke family, and from the 1820s James Weller Ladbroke began to undertake the development of the Ladbroke Estate. Working with the architect and surveyor Thomas Allason, Ladbroke began to lay out streets and houses, with a view to turning the area into a fashionable suburb of the capital (although the development did not get seriously under way until the 1840s). Many of these streets bear the Ladbroke name, including
Ladbroke Grove, the main north-south axis of the area, and
Ladbroke Square, the largest private garden square in London.
The original idea was to call the district Kensington Park, and other roads (notably
Kensington Park Road and Kensington Park Gardens) are reminders of this. The local telephone prefix 7727 (originally 727) is based on the old telephone exchange name of PARk.
The reputation of the district altered over the course of the 20th century. As middle class households ceased to employ servants, the large Notting Hill houses lost their market and were increasingly split into multiple occupation.
For much of the 20th century the large houses were subdivided into multi-occupancy rentals. Caribbean immigrants were drawn to the area in the 1950s, partly because of the cheap rents, but were exploited by slum landlords like Peter Rachman, and also became the target of white racist Teddy Boys in the 1958 Notting Hill race riots.
Notting Hill was slowly gentrified from the 1980s onwards now has a contemporary reputation as an affluent and fashionable area; known for attractive terraces of large Victorian townhouses, and high-end shopping and restaurants (particularly around
Westbourne Grove and
Clarendon Cross).
A Daily Telegraph article in 2004 used the phrase the ’Notting Hill Set’ to refer to a group of emerging Conservative politicians, such as David Cameron and George Osborne, who were once based in Notting Hill.
Since it was first developed in the 1830s, Notting Hill has had an association with artists and ’alternative’ culture.
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