Category: Notting Hill

Bulmer Mews, W11

Bulmer Mews is a tiny mews behind Notting Hill Gate.

Basing Street, W11

Basing Street was originally Basing Road between 1867 and 1939.

Baths and Clubs

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 …

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Thomas Hardy in the Madding Crowd

As the last few plots of rural Notting Hill were built over, Thomas Hardy took lodgings at 16 Westbourne Park Villas when he was working as a church draughtsman. From this decidedly urban setting alongside the railway lines just outside of Paddington, Hardy made his first tentative literary steps and pursued the Orsett Terrace lady’s …

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Going down the Lane

Another slum developed at Notting Hill Gate south of the road in the streets known as ‘the Racks’ (after the original field); Uxbridge, Newcombe, Calcott, Hillgate/Dartmoor, Farmer and Jameson. The main employer here would be the Dunhill cigarette factory on Uxbridge Street. As the Swan inn on Church Street became a gin palace, the Coach …

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Temperance and intemperance

The 1860s sexual revolution in Notting Hill and the vibrant local pub scene were inevitably accompanied by a proliferation of churches, chapels, convents, tabernacles and missions of all religious denominations. In the battle for the souls of the inhabitants of the Notting Hellmouth, the dark forces of drink, untidiness and inactivity had arrayed against them …

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Notting Hill in the Crimean War

Notting Hill in the 1850s had a similarly bad press to the coverage the area would receive in the 1950s. Ladbroke Gardens was known as ‘Coffin Row’ because ‘the windows had that ghastly form’, and ‘Goodwin Sands’ after the dangerous sandbanks off the Kent coast. Elgin Crescent was nicknamed ‘the Stumps’. According to the Building …

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A Tale of Two Cities

In the new suburbs carved out by the middle classes to escape from the noise, smoke, dirt, and crowding of the central areas of Victorian London, poor and squalid enclaves could frequently be found. They were not there by accident. The comfortable suburb and the meaner suburb within it were mutually interdependent. The Potteries, Notting …

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Holland House

Charles Dickens was visiting Holland House when he was writing his Gordon riots novel ‘Barnaby Rudge’. In the Earl of Ilchester’s ‘Holland House Chronicles’, he is described as ‘unobtrusive yet not shy, intelligent in countenance, and altogether prepossessing.’ He made a good impression on Caroline Fox, apart from ‘the intolerable dandyism of his dress’, but …

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Horbury Mews, W11

Horbury Mews is a T-shaped mews in Notting Hill.