‘The Ocean’ pit and the pottery field were acquired from the Adams family and the area was landscaped by ‘private munificence’ into a recreation ground and gardens featuring a mortuary chapel. Then the Vestry named it Avondale Park, in honour of the Duke of Clarence and Avondale, Albert Victor, the son and heir of the future king Edward VII (then the Prince of Wales).
In 1893 the surrounding Notting Dale slum area was described in the Daily News as a ‘West End Avernus’, after Lake Avernus, the entrance to hell in classical mythology. Turner’s painting of Lake Avernus at the mouth of the underworld, which inspired JG Frazer’s ritual study ‘The Golden Bough’, depicts Virgil’s tale of Aeneas visiting the grotto of the Sybil in the bay of Naples. She says: ‘Take my counsel then securely go; a mighty tree that bears a golden bough grows in a vale surrounded by a grove, and sacred to the queen of Stygian Jove, her netherworld no mortals can behold, till from the bough they strip the blooming gold.’
The Daily News (which was founded by Dickens and Chesterton was a contributor) illustrated a season in Notting Hell with drawings by the Strand magazine’s H Robinson of a tinkering gypsy, children queuing at a soup kitchen and an old man sitting in a chair on his doorstep. The sketches were captioned: ‘In the avernus of Notting Dale, the area around Pottery Lane and surrounding streets, a few gipsies still lingered with their vans and tinkers yards, children often depended on charity soup kitchens for their one hot meal of the day and old men, dying of consumption, sat out on chairs at their doors.’
The report concluded on Bangor, Crescent and Kenley Streets and St Catherine’s Road, that there was nothing ‘more hopelessly degraded and abandoned than life in those wretched places.’ Some years before the birth of Peter Rachman, the process of Rachmanism was already at work in Notting Hill with large properties intended for middle class families converted into common lodging houses. Especially in the case of Bangor and Crescent, in Florence Gladstone’s words, ‘whole streets were not inhabited by the class of people for whom they were designed.’
A London City Mission report in 1891 of 300 ‘fallen women’ around Bangor Street led to more bad press in which the area was called ‘a disgrace to Christianity and civilisation.’
In the wake of the 1893 Daily News coverage, reporting several brothels in the area – backed up by the vicars of St Clement’s and St James’s, the chairman of the Vestry Works and Sanitation committee, George Nelson Watts, wrote to the editor complaining about the ‘assumption that the Vestry of Kensington are indifferent to the state of the poor people inhabiting what is known as the Potteries district, Notting Dale.’
The Vestry blamed the ‘schemes carried out by the late Metropolitan Board of Works under the powers conferred by the Artisans and Labourers’ Dwellings Act’, for attracting ‘many of the waifs and strays of people driven from other districts’; along with ‘the vicious proclivities and evil habits… of constant recurrence in houses occupied by the lowest classes… largely brought about by the dirty and careless or mischievous habits of the people themselves.’
After a public meeting and site inspection, the Vestry sanitation committee found ‘no evidence in support of the allegations that many of the houses are ‘brothels of the lowest kinds.’ That many unfortunate women reside in the area would appear to be certain, but that they ply their trade to any large extent ‘at home’ is to say the least of it doubtful.’
Florence Gladstone stated that greater than ‘the evil of these licensed lodging houses’, accommodating over 700 people at 4 to 6d a night, was ‘that of the furnished rooms let from the evening until 10 the next morning at 10d or a shilling a night.’
In ‘Some Kensington Problems’, Agnes Alexander added that where ‘the street doors are open day and night inevitably leads to moral shipwreck.’ As Kenley Street (the formerly respectable William Street) became renowned as Notting Hill’s first red light district in the early 20th century, the Michael Palinesque urban missionary CS Donald observed: ‘The inflow of certain submerged and criminal types mostly concentrated in streets of furnished rooms which were often alive with vermin. Disorderly houses were not infrequent. Dissolute half-clad girls smoking in lice-ridden rooms are not pretty sights, which I have seen when visiting. The latter end of the lower class prostitute is pitiable. They disappear into the abyss or become toothless old hags. As (Charles) Booth says, it is the only profession where novices get the highest pay.’
At the end of the 19th century, Edward Walford summed up Notting Hill in ‘Old and New London’: ‘As soon as ever we quit the precincts of Kensington proper, and cross the Uxbridge Road (Holland Park Avenue), we become painfully conscious of change. We have left the ‘Old Court Suburb’, and find ourselves in one that is neither ‘old’ nor ‘court-like’. The roadway, with its small shops on either side, is narrow and unattractive, and the dwellings are not old enough to have a history or to afford shelter for an anecdote. About the centre of this thoroughfare, at the spot whence omnibuses are continually starting on the journey eastwards towards the City, stood till about the year 1850, a small and rather picturesque turnpike-gate, which commanded not only the road towards Notting Hill and Shepherd’s Bush but also that which branches off to the north and north-east in the direction of the Grove of Westbourne. What rural ideas and pictures arise before our mental eye as we mention Notting – possibly Nutting – Hill, and the Shepherd’s Bush and Westbourne Grove! We fear that the nuts, and the shepherds, and the nightingales which, so lately as the reign of William IV, sang sweetly here in the summer nights, are now, each and all, things of the past.’
Walford concluded that ‘much of the district through which we are about to pass bore rather a bad character for thieves and housebreakers, and was somewhat noted for its piggeries and potteries, but these have all been swept away by the advancing tide of bricks and mortar.’
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Fascinating info, thanks