In the wake of further sanitation campaigns, the Kensington Baths and Washhouse was finally established at the junction of Silchester Road and Lancaster Road in 1888. By then the Latimer Road Board School was catering for over 1,000 pupils, after the original Ragged School opened in the 1860s for 100. Notting Dale also hosted the Blechynden Street Ragged School known as ‘Brown’s School’, the Crescent Street Hall School, and St Clement’s National School, nicknamed ‘The Penny Board School’, which became the Sirdar Road LCC School. The first pupils of the latter, who were reputedly bribed to attend with sweets, were described as ‘extraordinarily rough, ragged and undisciplined.’ The Salvation Army Hall on Portobello Road was originally another Ragged School, superseded in 1876 by the Notting Hill Board School on Portobello and Lancaster Road, which became the Portobello, North Kensington and Isaac Newton School, a course centre then a private school. Colville School on Portobello and Lonsdale Road began as Buckingham Terrace School in 1879 to cater for the Bolton Mews slum kids.
The Harrow School Mission was founded on Latimer (now Freston) Road in 1884 by old boys of the Harrow public school, and then the Rugby boys’ club was set up on Walmer Road by the Rugby public school old boy Arthur Walrond in 1887. On Kensal Road the Cobden Working Men’s Club and Institute was named in honour of Richard Cobden, the early 19th century anti-corn law campaigner. Queen’s Park Rangers football club was founded by the merger of the Ladbroke Grove Christ Church Rangers and St Jude’s Institute teams; the Christ Church was on the site of the adventure playground and now the fire station. In Powis Square Lord Shaftesbury, the Tory social reformer who brought about the end of child labour, laid the foundation stone of the Tabernacle (which replaced the original tin Talbot Tabernacle) and opened the lecture hall in 1888. Lord Shaftesbury reported to the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes that ‘many of the suburbs are now being overcrowded just like the centre of London; for instance, Notting Hill is beginning to be overcrowded like the worst parts of London, and it is very hard indeed upon those populations, because these people come down into districts where the demand for labour is not very great, and make the demand for labour so very little that they are half starved.’