Foreward | Getting it Straight in Notting Hill Gate | Gravel Pits |
A pre-19th century chronology
200 000-10 000 BCE The archaeology of Kensington and Chelsea begins with Palaeolithic activity during the ice age at the edge of the glaciers. Flint axes from the period have been found in South Kensington and Chelsea, and there would also have been ice age activity on the gravel deposits from the old terrace of the Thames in North Kensington.
10 000-4000 BCE More flint implement finds from the Mesolithic period suggest seasonal hunter-gatherer settlements in the area.
4000-800 BCE The advent of farming, pottery and stone axes in the Neolithic period resulted in more permanent settlements and trees being cut down. In the later Neolithic bronze age European immigrants introduced more varied pottery – the first trendy bric-a-brac – and metal implements were produced locally.
800-54 BCE During the iron age more trees were cut down to make trackways through the dense forest.
In ‘Notting Hill in Bygone Days’ Florence Gladstone recalled: ‘In 1916 placards posted in the stations of the Central London Railway stated that Holland Park Avenue was the Via Trinobantia of the Romans, the chief road of the late Celtic kingdom of the Trinobantes whose capital was Colchester.’ According to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 1136 mythological ‘History of the Kings of Britain’, Trinobantia or Trinovantium is derived from Troynovant – the New Troy, the original London of the first king of Britain, the Trojan Brutus, who was descended from Aeneas, the legendary forefather of Rome’s founders.
54 BCE-250 AD The Romans found the Kensington and Chelsea area under the control of the Catuvellauni, the strongest tribe of the iron age. In Geoffrey Ashe’s ‘Mythology of the British Isles’, the Belgic Celt Trinobantes formed an alliance with Julius Caesar against the Catuvellauni under Cassivellaunus. His successor, Cunobelinus or Cymbeline (the father of Caractacus), regarding the treaty with Caesar as having lapsed, conquered the Trinobantes, who then joined Boadicea’s Iceni in the destruction of the first Romano-British London in 61 AD.
The first Roman road works upgraded the original Celtic west trackway (following the route of Bayswater Road-Notting Hill Gate-Holland Park Avenue) to the Great West Road paved way via strata to Silchester (Calleva Atrebatum, the abandoned Roman town between Reading and Basingstoke). At Notting Hill Gate there was a change in alignment of the Roman road’s straight trajectory, probably indicating a beacon sighting point to correspond with one near Egham. And in all likelihood there would have been farms and villas alongside the road.
250-500 In 1841 the Gentleman’s Magazine reported that workmen excavating the foundations of 67-75 Ladbroke Grove had discovered a stone coffin filled with lime, containing an adult skeleton; and remains of other coffins, thought to be Roman, were found along with bone and ivory pins. Florence Gladstone (who lived at 46 Ladbroke Grove) wrote in the 1920s of a ‘trough of broken masonry’ in the garden of the St John’s church vicarage, thought to be a Roman sarcophagus unearthed in 1850 on the site of 1 Ladbroke Square: ‘a likely position for a Roman grave close to a main road. Being a coffin burial the date would be after 250 AD.’ This could merely mean a few roadside burials outside the Londinium city limits, but, from parallels with other Roman towns, the 1970s archaeology survey concluded that there would have been a villa on Ladbroke Grove on the site of St John’s church.
[Nutting Hill: Saxon Sons of Cnotta or Danish Knut’s Hill] The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded a church council or synod in 785 at the residence of King Offa the Terrible of Mercia in Cealchythe, which was probably Chelsea. According to WW Skeet’s Saxon place name theory, around this time the sons of Cynesige founded Chenesitun at the junction of Kensington High Street and Church Street; the Poedings or the sons of Padda settled in Paddington (where a sub-Roman Padda coin was discovered); and the Cynesige tribe off-shoot, the Contingas or sons of Cnotta, made their stockade on the site of the probable Roman villa on the Notting Hill knoll. But, with the old English word ‘cnotta’ allied to knitting, the Danes could have a better claim: Kensington derived from Kyning’s Tun (King’s End Town) and Notting Hill from a frontier encampment of King Canute/Knut. Knotting in Bedfordshire derives from Noding, the Danish term for cattle pasture, and there’s an entrenched camp in the Cotswolds called Notting Hill.
In GK Chesterton’s ‘The Napoleon of Notting Hill’, King Auberon concludes his address to the Society for the Recovery of London Antiquities saying, “It is not for me to settle the question as to whether Notting Hill means Nutting Hill in allusion to the rich woods which no longer cover it, or whether it is a corruption of the saying Nothing-ill, referring to its reputation among the ancients as an earthly paradise.” Florence Gladstone initially dismisses these theories as romantic notions, in favour of the Saxon tribe name derivation, but she comes round to thinking there could be something to the former. Of the nutting theory’s best piece of evidence, the 1788 ‘Children Nutting’ picture by the local artist George Morland, she has to admit ‘it seems quite possible that the subject was suggested by the nut bushes which, according to tradition, were bountiful all over the neighbourhood.’ To her predecessor, the Victorian local historian WJ Loftie the hill or knoll at the start of Ladbroke Grove was ‘so called, it can hardly be doubted, from the nut trees with which it abounded.’
1086 The first description of the Notting Hill area in the Domesday Book is basically woods inhabited by pigs. By then the manor of Chenesitun had passed from Edwin the Thegn of Edward the Confessor, to Geoffrey de Montbray, Bishop of Coutances, and was being held for him by the Norman lord Aubrey de Vere. The original Kensington was a settlement on the site of St Mary Abbots church at the junction of Kensington High Street and Church Street. In 1086 it consisted of 26 men, a priest, 18 farmers, 6 of whom were comparatively wealthy, their families and serfs/slaves, around 200 people in all, cultivating 1,400 acres, with 500 acres of common pastureland for their cattle, and the northern woodland inhabited by their herd of 200 pigs, in total 1,911 acres.
In Loftie’s translation in ‘Kensington Picturesque and Historical’, ‘Albericus de Ver holds of the Bishop of Coutances Chenesitun. It was assessed for 10 hides (a hide equals 120 acres). The land is 10 carucates (as much as can be cultivated by one plough). There are 4 ploughs in the demesne, and the villains (free peasants) have 5 ploughs which might be increased to 6. 12 villains have each a virgate (30 acres) there, and there are 6 villains with 3 virgates. The priest has half a virgate, and there are 7 serfs. There is a meadow for the teams of 2 ploughs. There is pasture for the cattle of the vill, woods for 200 pigs, and 3 arpents of vineyard. With all profits it is worth £10, when received £6, in the time of King Edward £10, Edwin, a thegn of King Edward, held the manor and could sell it.’
The Kensington manor is defined by two streams, the Westbourne to the east and Counter’s Creek to the west, both of which now run underground. The Westbourne goes under the Grand Union canal and Paddington Station before emerging into the Serpentine in Hyde Park and carrying on through Sloane Square tube station to the Thames. The northern boundary became the ‘crooked horse track’ from Paddington to Harlesden otherwise known as the Harrow Road. To the south Fulham Road marks the boundary with Chelsea, to the west is Shepherd’s Bush, to the east Bayswater and Paddington. Bayswater is derived from the Norman Baynard’s Watering Hole on the Westbourne.
Over the next few centuries, as nothing much continued to happen locally apart from property dealing and the occasional mugging, the old feudal manor of Kensington was gradually divided into 4 mini-manors; the central Abbots’ manor, the southern Earl’s Court, West Town or the Groves, and the northern Notting Barns woodland. As Loftie sets the scene, from the time of the first Aubrey de Vere to that of the 20th, ‘the green slopes towards Willesden were then almost as thickly covered with woods as they are now with houses, and few families lived far from the protection afforded by the neighbourhood; but while men went forth to follow the plough, to sow their seed, or garner their corn, the women and children drove the cattle of the town to the pasture and their herd of 200 pigs to pick up beech mast and acorns in the woods.’
The De Vere Timelords of the Manor
Thomas Macaulay called the de Veres ‘the longest and most illustrious line of nobles that England has seen.’ WJ Loftie added ‘the popular idea that Vere is almost a synonym for nobility’, and described their genealogy as ‘a mystery, a tangled web of so far unsolved problems.’ In Laurence Gardner’s ‘Realm of the Ring Lords’, the de Veres become the mystical elf kings of Kensington. In ‘the shining ones’ theory, they were descended from Rainfroi or Raymond de Verrieres en Forez and, through his wife Princess Melusine, the second century King Ver of Caledonia, Irish kings, Scythians, pharaohs and the Lords of the Ring. The name is probably derived from a small town on the river Ver near Coutances in Normandy, and was almost always spelt Veer, in Latin de Veer, sometimes de Ver, very rarely and never in English de Vere. The first Aubrey’s wife Beatrix was probably William the Conqueror’s sister, and he also held land in Essex, Middlesex, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdon and Suffolk.
1087-1100 In the reign of William Rufus, the first or second Aubrey de Vere obtained the freehold property rights to the feudal manor of Kensington. In 1106 Henry I made the second Aubrey Lord Great Chamberlain of England, possibly with the barony of Kensington (then spelt Chensnetuna) attached to the hereditary post. The de Veres were landlords of Kensington for most of the half millennium from William I to James I, so they probably held manorial court at Earl’s Court, where there was a building in the middle ages; and traces of a medieval house have also been found in Holland Park, but by all accounts neither was occupied by de Veres. The Normans made little more impression on the area than the Saxons, all the street and building names – De Vere Gardens, Mews, House, Hotel, Aubrey House, Villas, Road, Walk, Square – are allusions to their noble legend rather than local activity. De Vere Gardens in Ilford, Essex, has a better historical claim to the name.
Like modern media celebrities, the de Veres barely qualify as locals but they defined and represented the area in the medieval news. There were de Vere knights in shining armour on the crusades, at all the major battles, Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt, and other great historical events. The second Aubrey was killed in a London riot during the Anarchy of King Stephen’s reign. Whereupon his son, the third Aubrey de Vere, the Grim, Aper or the Boar, the crusader Count of Guisnes and champion of Queen Matilda, became the next lord of the manor of Kensington and Lord Great Chamberlain of England. According to tradition, the third Aubrey, ‘who for the greatness of his stature and sterne look was named Albry the Grymme’, saw the star of Bethlehem that led the crusaders to victory at Antioch in 1098 and appeared on the de Vere shield henceforth (but it must have been the second Aubrey). Earl’s Court possibly acquired its name in 1155 when Henry II made Aubrey the Grim the honorary Earl of Oxford (he didn’t get the actual county). The area could also be named after the later Earls of Holland and Warwick.
1170 As part of the Middlesex forest, Kensington in the 12th century was described by William Fitzstephen as consisting of ‘densely wooded thickets, the coverts of game, red and fallow dear, boars and wild bulls.’
1194 Aubrey the Grim was succeeded by his son, another Aubrey who was with Richard I in Normandy and added Sheriff of Essex and Hertford to the de Vere titles.
1215 After the demise of the 4th Aubrey in the reign of King John, his brother Robert became the next earl and one of the baron guardians of Magna Charta. The following year the de Vere castle Hedingham in Essex was besieged and duly taken by John. Robert de Vere, the 3rd Earl of Oxford, has since been merged with the outlaw Robert Fitzooth, better known as Robin Hood, as a woodlord claimant to the earldom of Huntingdon.
1237 His son Hugh, the 4th Earl, was licensed to crusade. The 5th Earl, Hugh’s son Robert, was with Simon de Montfort’s first parliament in the war of the barons against Henry III. 1265 After de Montfort’s defeat at the battle of Evesham, the second Robert de Vere was taken prisoner and forfeited the chamberlain office.
1296 His son Robert, ‘the good Earl’, got it back again.
1331 He was succeeded by his nephew John, the even more illustrious 7th Earl of Oxford who was at the battles of Crecy and Poitiers.
1359 The first local news story, and recorded mention of Notting Hill, came in the Patent Rolls report of a robbery by William Lovel, of ‘a cart and a cap of Stratherne and other goods in the cart at Knottynghull’ from Thomas de Holland, the Earl of Kent. After his death the following year, Thomas de Holland’s wife, ‘the fair maid of Kent’ Joan Plantagenet, married her cousin the Black Prince. William Lovel was subsequently pardoned by Edward III for serving with the Black Prince in France. The Notting Hill stretch of the road, which eventually became Holland Park Avenue (coincidentally named after the later Lord Hollands), was known as the Waye to Acton or the King’s Highway, the North Highway, the Uxbridge Road or the Oxford Road.
Florence Gladstone imagined that ‘there must always have been a considerable amount of traffic on the northern highway; two-wheeled carts and loaded farm-wagons, groups of folk on foot or riding astride horses, coming to market at the periodical fairs, droves of sheep and cattle, or a string of pack-horses with men and dogs in attendance; all the ordinary wayfaring life of the middle ages, with now and then the movement of troops, a religious pilgrimage or a lordly procession.’
1371 On the demise of the 8th Earl of Oxford, Thomas de Vere (the son of Crecy John), the manor of Kensington passed to his 10 year old son Robert. This 4th Robert de Vere and 9th Earl of Oxford grew up to be the most hated favourite of Richard II (the son of the Black Prince).
1381 After the peasants’ revolt he was made the first English Marquis, of Dublin, and then Duke of Ireland. But he subsequently fell foul of the king’s uncle, the Duke of Gloucester; was banished to France, forfeiting his lands and titles, and killed by a boar whilst hunting. According to Laurence Gardner’s ‘Realm of the Ring Lords’, the 14th century Robert de Vere’s outlawed royal favourite status makes him another Robin Hood suspect.
1393 A new grant of the earldom of Oxford was given to the uncle of Robert the 9th Earl, another Aubrey, while Kensington went to Robert’s wife Phillipa, the Duchess of Ireland, and on her demise passed to Henry IV.
1400 At the beginning of the 15th century Aubrey the 10th Earl was succeeded by his son Richard, who was at Agincourt with Henry V. 1420 Kensington was restored to his son John, a leading Lancastrian supporter of Henry VI in the wars of the roses.
1462 However, he lost the manor (by then including ‘Knottynges-bernes’) again when the Yorkist Edward IV prevailed; along with his head and that of his son Aubrey.
1476 Notting Hill had its first notorious landlord scandal when another Duke of Gloucester, Edward IV’s brother who would become the last Plantagenet king Richard III, in Tudor propaganda at least, evicted the de Vere women ‘by compulsion, cohercion, and emprisonment’, due to ‘his inordinate covetyze and ungodly dispocion.’
1485 At the end of the wars of the roses, the de Veres were back on the winning side and Kensington went back to John (another son of beheaded John), with the rest of the de Vere lands and titles, for service rendered on Bosworth Field.
1488 Yet he was the one who finally lost control of the feudal de Vere manor, in the process making Notting Barns a manor in its own right.
Having survived the Plantagenets, the unlucky 13th Earl of Oxford managed to fall out with Henry VII by ‘putting his retainers in livery to receive the king at Castle Hedingham’ (ie. having his own private army). As a result of this most serious style violation in local history, Loftie has: ‘the debts and charges which had to be paid out of the estates were enormous. Kensington, that is the manor of Earl’s Court, was settled as dowry on the two countesses, and we now find Notting Barns, or Knotting Barnes, a wholly separate entity.’ With John de Vere’s Bosworth comrade-in-arms Sir Reginald Bray acting as the estate agent, ‘the manor of Notingbarons’ passed to the king’s mother, Margaret, Countess of Richmond. At this stage it consisted of ‘a messuage (hall, dwelling or manor house), 400 acres of land fit for cultivation, 5 acres of meadows and 140 acres of wood: 545 acres in all.’ 1509 After the demise of the Countess of Richmond the Notting Barns mini-manor went to Westminster Abbey, and they leased the land to the City alderman Robert Fenroper-Fenrother, later Sheriff of London.
1518 Fenroper sub-let ‘Notingbarns’ to his son-in-law Henry White, a gentlemen sheep farmer.
1526 ‘Nottingbarons’ had shrunk to 420 acres; 40 arable, 140 meadow, 200 wood, 20 moor, 20 furze and heath. The Whites can be described as the first official local residents; although they lived at Westbourne Place to the east, they owned the Notting Barns manor farmhouse (to the west of the St Mark’s Road roundabout).
1535 At the time of the dissolution of the monasteries Henry White and his wife died, possibly of plague; the property rights reverted to the crown and Notting Hill had the most notorious landlord in British history. However, Henry VIII’s local dealings don’t seem to have been all that ruthless. At first the land was put in trust for the White children who continued to live at Westbourne Place. Around this time the first Romany gypsy encampment is thought to have been made in Notting Dale.
1543 As Henry VIII married his 6th wife Catherine Parr, Robert White was issued with notice to quit in apparently fair exchange for a manor in Southampton. In the deed of exchange, ‘Robert White esquire bargained and sold to the king his manor of Knotting Barns, in Kensington, with all messuages, cottages, mills, etc, to hold to the king, his heirs and successors, in exchange for the manor of Over Burgate in the county of Southampton… The manor of Nuttingbarnes, with the appurtenances in the county of Middlesex, and the farm of Nuttyng-barnes, in the parish of Kensington, and the capital messuage with the appurtenances called Westbourne in the parish of Paddington, in the same county, and also the wood and lands called Nuttyngwood, Dorkyns Hernes, and Bulfre Grove, in the parish of Kensington, as also two messuages and tenements in Chelsaye, with all other possessions of the said Robert White, in the same places and parishes; and in consideration of £106 had other lands conveyed to him by the king.’
The 200 acre Nuttyng-wood covered the St John’s church knoll between the Northlands and North Crofts. The North Kensington fields were Dorkyns Hernes (corner) – probably named after a farmer called Dorking or Darking – to the west of the Chelsea Outland fields of Kensal, Darking Busshes or Darkingby Johes, Holmefield, Balserfield, Baudelands, Bulfre Grove, the Sunhawes (hedgerow) meadow next to ‘the close of Nottingbarnes’, and the Downes arable land on the site of Westbourne Park station.
1544 The year Notting Barns was spelt ‘Nuttingbars’.
1549 After Henry VIII’s brief 4 years as landlord, Edward VI granted the manor to Sir William Paulet or Pawlet, Lord St John of Basing and Marquis of Winchester.
1562 In the next reign, Paulet found himself ‘indebted in sundry sums to her majesty’, and Notting Barns passed to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, along with the office of Lord High Treasurer on Paulet’s demise.
1586 Notting Barns farmhouse acted as the proto-MI5 spy HQ during the search for Anthony Babington and his co-conspirators in the plot to assassinate Elizabeth I and replace her with Mary Queen of Scots. Lord Burghley made a report of a meeting at Notting Barns with his and Francis Walsingham’s agents, ‘who were searching scattered houses between St John’s Wood and Harrow.’ The Pelican pub and Tavistock Road are probably named in honour of Francis Drake, as his ship the Golden Hind, in which he circumnavigated the world, was originally called the Pelican and he was born in Tavistock, Devon. Drake died at sea off Porto Belo, Panama, which was taken from the Spanish by a British fleet 143 years later in 1739, causing the naming of the North Kensington farm and thus the road and market.
There’s also a theory that the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere wrote William Shakespeare’s plays, portrayed in the film ‘Anonymous’ starring Rhys Ifans as the 17th Earl. A student of John Dee, writer/poet ‘friend of the muses’, he was one of the peers who tried Mary Queen of Scots and a commander in the fleet against the Spanish Armada in 1588. However, he dissipated the other de Vere estates and was buried in Hackney Church in 1605. The best evidence that the 17th Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays is Oberon, the King of the Fairies in ‘A Midsummer’s Night Dream’, is synonymous with the de Vere name Aubrey, Albrey, Alberic or Alberich the dwarf lord in ‘The Nibelungenlie’, overlord, high-light-shining-elf king, equivalent of Arthur. In GK Chesterton’s ‘The Napoleon of Notting Hill’ novel, the randomly selected joker king Auberon is presumed to be the godson of the King of the Fairies.
1599 On Lord Burghley’s demise at the end of the 16th century, Notting Barns was sold for £2,000 to Walter Cope, a political ally of Burghley’s son Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, described as chiefly concerned with economics and trade, especially ‘in promoting the exploitation of the New World.’ Thus Cope went on to acquire most of Kensington. The Abbot’s manor, his first acquisition in 1591, came with a sitting tenant, Robert Horseman, who Cope had a lengthy property rights dispute with. In their eventual agreement, after some majestic intervention, Horseman kept the parsonage of St Mary Abbots church and 200 acres; apparently including the ‘closes and wood-grounds called Norlands… abutting on a wood called Notting Wood… upon a farm called Notting Barnes… and upon the common sewer; and also two closes called North Crofts, on the north side of the highway leading from London to Acton, near unto the Gravel Pits of Kensington.’
1600 By the turn of the 17th century the first pub in the area, the Plough Inn, had appeared along the Harrow Road trackway. A sketch of the pub in the 19th century by Mary and Robert Banks is captioned: ‘The Plough, Kensal Green, is supposed to have been built about 1500 and remarkable for having been the favourite retreat of the celebrated Morland.’
The 18th century local artist George Morland, who did the ‘Children Nutting’ picture, specialised in pubs and lived near the Plough.
Morland House on Lancaster Road is named in his honour.
1601 In the most successful property speculation to date, Walter Cope sold off Notting Barns for £3,400 to the alderman Henry Anderson. 1603 In the first outbreak of the plague a third of the 49 deaths in Kensington were attributed to it. 1606 Henry Anderson left Notting Barns, still including 130 acres of woodland, held of the crown by fealty and £2-3 rent, to his son Richard.
1607 The first recorded local murder was of Sir Manhood Penruddock, who was ‘slaine in Notting wood in fight’, either by robbers or possibly in a duel over his confrontational name.
As Walter Cope proceeded to build a house on the hill, he lived in the West Town mini-manor ‘ould house at Kensington’ around the site of Addison Road.
1610 Cope bought the West Town Kensington manor from the de Vere heiress Anne Cornwallis, as Sir Baptist Hicks, another James I favourite, acquired ‘a capital messuage and two closes known as the Racks and Kings Mead.’
1616 Robert Horseman’s son sold up to Hicks, who built a mansion to rival ‘Cope’s Castle’. This became Campden House when he took the title Viscount Campden from his country seat in Gloucestershire. As well as giving the hill its name, Baptist Hicks founded the first local charity community scheme with his bequest of £200 a year to ‘the poor of the town of Kensington, for the good and benefit of the parish forever’; later increased by his wife to ‘put forth one poor boy or more to be apprentices.’
1624 ‘Cope’s Castle’, known to him as Kensington House, became Holland House due to his son-in-law, Sir Henry Rich, the first Earl of Holland in Lincolnshire. His father Robert, Lord Rich of Leigh, became the first Rich Earl of Warwick, but he didn’t get the castle. His grandfathers were Richard Rich, a courtier of Henry VIII, and the executed Elizabeth I favourite Earl of Essex. His mother Lady Penelope Devereux was ‘Stella’, the heroine of Sir Phillip Sidney’s sonnets. Henry Rich was taken under the wing of the Duke of Buckingham and became another favourite of the gay monarch James I, to the extent of receiving ‘unpleasing caresses.’ The greatest Notting Hill style victim in history began the Rich Holland mini-dynasty in the cavalier style that his name suggests, but then went drastically out of fashion with the next two regimes as a turncoat. After coming into the manor through his marriage with Isobel Cope, he was made Baron of Kensington in 1623 and Earl of Holland the following year for arranging the wedding of the Prince of Wales, the future Charles I, with Louis XIII’s sister Henrietta-Maria. At the beginning of Charles I’s ill-fated reign, he commanded the reinforcements that arrived too late to help the Duke of Buckingham’s attempt to raise Cardinal Richelieu’s siege of the Huguenots at La Rochelle.
1629-41 At the time of the absolute monarchy of Charles I’s infamous Court of Star Chamber, Henry Rich was responsible for enforcing the forest laws taxation which ‘brought more prejudice on the Court than any other.’ At the same time he was intriguing against the king’s ministers. After challenging the Duke of Portland’s son to a duel he was briefly imprisoned, but through his influence with the queen came back into royal favour with the posts of Groom of the Stole and first Lord of the Bedchamber. As General of the Horse against the 1639 Scottish Protestant rebellion, he oversaw the retreat. After that he opposed the dissolution of the Short Parliament and was a prime mover in the Long Parliament. By 1641 Kensington had undergone a seismic geopolitical shift from royalist to parliamentarian. After Henry Rich demobilised the army as Captain-General north of the Trent, Edward Hyde, the royalist politician-historian Earl of Clarendon, wrote in ‘The History of the Rebellion’: ‘The Earl of Holland in great pomp, returned to his house, in Kensington; where he was visited and caressed, with great application, by all the factious party.’ This was just before the final split between the king and parliament and Charles quitting London.
As the royal standard was raised at Nottingham, Henry Rich was duly dropped as Groom of the Stole. After the battle of Edgehill, with the royalist army marching on the capital, the first Lord Holland ‘exhorted the citizens of London to defend the city’ against the king.
1642 At the battle of Brentford, Henry Rich ‘drew up his forces’ at Turnham Green with the parliamentarian field army and the London militia, to check the king’s advance and win the propaganda victory if not the actual battle/skirmish. Then he attempted to go back to the king. As the leader of the party for peace, Henry took it upon himself to become the parliamentary emissary at the siege of Gloucester, and even charged with Prince Rupert’s cavalry at Newbury. By then, however, ‘there was no particular that gave the king more unquietness than the presence of my lord of Holland.’ On his return to London from Oxford, Henry Rich was held under house arrest again and, although his peace deal excuse was accepted, this left him ‘notably despised by all persons of credit in the parliament and the armie.’
1645 Following the new model army victory at the battle of Naseby, he advised the king to give himself up to the Scottish army and was involved in the Presbyterian scheme of settlement with the king that started the second civil war.
1647 After the army coup took the king out of parliament’s hands and Fairfax’s march on London, the Perfect Diurnal reported on August 6 1647: ‘This morning the members of Parliament which were driven by tumults from Westminster met the General (Fairfax) at the Earle of Holland’s house at Kensington, and subscribed to the declaration of the armie, and a further declaration of their approving and joining the armie in their last proceedings.’
1648 Henry Rich carried on plotting with the Scots before embarking on his final and least successful military foray. In the July 1648 counter-rebellion he appeared as a royalist general with a force of 600 men, in an attempt to raise the siege of Colchester. This ended in ignominious defeat, imprisonment in Warwick Castle, and execution at Westminster.
1649 In spite of pleas on his behalf from his parliamentarian brother, the 2nd Earl of Warwick, and General Fairfax, a month after the king’s execution, on March 9 1649 Henry Rich, the first Earl of Holland, was beheaded in Palace Yard. ‘Foppish to the last’, he was dressed in white satin waistcoat and cap trimmed with silver lace. After his burial in St Mary Abbots church a local legend arose of his ghost haunting the Gilt Room of Holland House above the main entrance. His apparition was said to enter the drawing room via a secret doorway and drift slowly through the scene of his triumphs and disasters, with the customary head held in hand. As royalists became ghosts on the landscape, Henry’s daughter, Lady Diana Rich, reputedly met her own apparition in Holland Park shortly before dying of small pox.
The Earl of Clarendon summed up the first Earl of Holland as ‘a very handsome man, of a lovely winning presence, and gentle conversation by which he got so easy an admission into the court and grace of King James… and continued to flourish above any man in the court, whilst the weather was fair; but the storm did no sooner arise, but he changed so much and declined so fast from the honour he was thought to be master of. The Earl of Holland was a person merely of the king’s creation, raised from the condition of a private gentleman without a great fortune, to a great height by the king’s mere favour and bounty. He took more care to be thought a good friend to parliaments, than a good servant to his master.’ Clarendon wrote less sympathetically of Henry’s older brother Robert Rich, the parliamentarian Lord High Admiral, 2nd Earl of Warwick: ‘He betook himself to the protection of the Protector, married his heir to his daughter, and left his estate, which before was subject to a vast debt, more improved and repaired than any man who trafficked in that desperate commodity of rebellion.’ Like his brother, the Earl of Warwick also ‘interested himself in the plantations.’
Holland House subsequently had a spell as the New Model Army headquarters. In another Perfect Diurnal report, ‘the Lord-General (Fairfax) is removed from Queen Street to the late Earl of Holland’s house in Kensington, where he intends to reside.’ Sir Thomas Fairfax had an aristocratic as well as revolutionary claim to the property through his wife who was a staunch royalist de Vere, the daughter of Lord Vere of Tilbury. In Leigh Hunt’s ‘Old Court Suburb’, Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton are said to have conferred in front of Holland House, near the site of the Commonwealth Institute.
1651 After the defeat of Charles II at Worcester, Oliver Cromwell was conducted in state along the North Highway (Holland Park Avenue), and he probably donated the ‘Cromwell’s Gift’ field at ‘the Gravel Pits in Kensington’ (Notting Hill Gate) to the Campden Charities. Stone cannonballs and clay tobacco pipes found with the Roman coffin in the garden of 1 Ladbroke Square could mean there was an ambush during the civil war on Holland Park Avenue.
In the 17th century the parish registers started recording the births and deaths (often of the plague) of the Ilford family landlords of the local Plough inns, the Arnolds of Norlands and Earl’s Court, ‘the chief bourgeois of old Kensington’, the Notting Barns farm labourers and roadside cottage dwellers. As the population of North Kensington grew to a hundred families, other common surnames were Breteridge, Bronckard, Ellis, Fell and King. These were accompanied by an occasional ‘poore boy’, ‘bastard childe’ and ‘strange woman’ including one Dorothy Daggers and another called Alice Welfare. The introduction of Overseers of the Poor often resulted in such ‘outdwellers’ being hounded out of parishes to prevent them becoming a charge on the rates, as well as a health hazard. ‘The many tramps, in tattered garments and begrimed with dirt, who wandered through the land were especially dangerous at such a time. Such persons, when too ill to travel further, would creep into outhouses or barns to die. Others died by the wayside or ‘in the Cage’, a low two-roomed shed by the churchyard gate, which served as the parish lock-up and casual ward.’
1663 As the first Turnpike Act came into force the North Highway was still little more than a track and would remain so into the 18th century.
1665 In the third and worst outbreak of the plague half of the 74 deaths in Kensington were attributed to ‘the tyrant malady’, including Mistress Ilford of the Harrow Road Plough Inn and the Norland Arnolds.
1666 The year of the Great Fire of London only a 6th of local deaths were due to plague. During the Commonwealth there were up to 4 inns along the North Highway around the Kensington Gravel Pits (Notting Hill Gate). There seems to have been another Plough on the southern road which had Commonwealth trade tokens inscribed with ‘Robert Davenporte at God speed the Plow Kinsington Gravel Pits.’ Florence Gladstone described Thomas Hill’s Harrow Inn (at Notting Hill Gate, not on the Harrow Road) as ‘a house that must have been very insanitary, for between 1676 and 1679 the Hills lost 3 daughters and 2 soldier lodgers.’ Peter Sammon, another Gravel Pits landlord who’s token featured a Talbot passant dog, ‘one of the faithful hounds who guarded the wares’, lost 2 children in 1666 to the plague. In 1678 ‘2 sick soldiers John Gentleman and Robert Collingwood died at John Ilford’s house at ye Plow near ye Gravellpits.’ The Ilford landlords of the Harrow Road Plough leased a cottage for 99 years at the Gravel Pits, which is ‘very suggestive of the Plough, now 144 High Street, opposite Campden Hill Road, though that tavern is not known to have existed prior to 1769.’
At Holland House it seems that normal aristocratic service soon resumed after the execution of the first Earl of Holland. In the Historica Histrionica, the house was cited as a key venue on the cavalier ‘poor players’ circuit during the puritan clampdown of the Commonwealth years, under the auspices of the first Lady Holland, Isobel Rich nee Cope: ‘In Oliver’s time royalist players used to act privately, 3 or 4 miles out of town, now here, now there, sometimes in noblemen’s houses, in particular, Holland House at Kensington, where the nobility and gentry who met used to make a sum for them, each giving a broad piece.’ The 2nd Earl of Holland, Henry and Isobel’s son Robert Rich, went down in history as a Restoration rake. On the demise of his cousin, the 5th Earl of Warwick, he briefly became the first joint Earl of Warwick and Holland. His son, Edward Rich, became the 6th Earl of Warwick and the 3rd of Holland aged 2. The 2nd joint earl is chiefly notable for being convicted of manslaughter after he acted as a second in a fatal duel. The next, his son Edward, turned out to be the worst; the Holland House historian 6th Earl of Ilchester described him as ‘vicious and depraved.’ The joint earldom expired in the 18th century with his cousin, another Edward Rich, and Holland House went to the son of Elizabeth Rich (the daughter of the first joint earl), William Edwardes, who was made a peer of Ireland as Baron Kensington. This title was sold to a property developer with a house in St Mary Abbots Place in 1998.
1672 At some point in the 17th century, Notting Barns ceased to belong to the crown and became the property of the Andersons. However, in 1672 it was included in the Rich Abbots manor of Kensington and Richard Anderson (probably the second) was down as the freeholder of 400 acres. The Restoration homage to the lord of the manor included: ‘For the commons we present Notting Hill, the waste by the highways and the gravel pits.’ At the time of the first modern spelling, what is now Notting Hill Gate was known as the Kensington Gravel Pits; Notting Hill north of the road was Near Kensington Gravel Pits or the even less appealing ‘Waste by the highways’. Yet, it was the gravel that made the area a resort of the rich and famous. As London became increasingly polluted a spurious theory developed that it was healthier to live on a gravel layer than in a clay area. The aroma given off from the gravel carts was thought to be of particular medicinal benefit.
In ‘Old and New London’ Edward Walford wrote of the Gravel Pits, ‘this must be understood as a vague name for an undefined district, lying partly to the north and partly to the south of the Uxbridge Road.’ Florence Gladstone elaborated: ‘In the second half of the 17th century ‘Near Kensington Gravel Pits’ was used to distinguish the whole district of North Kensington, from Campden Hill to Kensal Green, besides being the recognised name of the village which bordered the high road. It was only in the 19th century that Kensington Gravel Pits became a ‘blotted out locality’.’
1689 In a late 17th century engraving of Beaufort House in Chelsea the wooded skyline is punctuated by the Holland, Campden (spelt Camden) and Kensington houses. The area’s fashionable appeal was confirmed after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ when William III (of Orange) and Mary II chose the latter (after considering Holland House) to convert into Kensington Palace (spelt Kingsington on the first sketch), as ‘the smoak fires of London much incommoded his majesty, who was always troubled with an asthma, and could not bear lying in town.’ The palace was originally known as Nottingham House after the previous owner, the Earl of Nottingham Sir Heneage Finch, the Recorder of London.
1705 The old court suburb of William and Mary and Anne was eulogised by John Bowack in ‘Antiquities of Middlesex’ as ‘a handsome and populous place, resorted to by persons of quality, especially in the summer months when it is extremely filled with lodgers for the pleasure of the air, walks and gardens round it, several handsome new-built houses and a famous Chalybial (mineral water) spring much esteemed and resorted to for its medicinal virtues.’ Bowack noted that ‘Mr Arnold had a handsome pleasant seat at the Gravel Pits.’ In ‘The Dispensary’ poem Dr Samuel Garth joked that, before the poor received free health care, ‘Alps shall sink to vales, and leeches in our glasses turn to whales, alleys at Wapping furnish us with new modes, and Monmouth Street Versailles’ riding hoods, the rich to the hundreds in pale crowds repair, and change the Gravel Pits for Kentish air.’
Following the discovery of springs on the hill, purportedly containing Glauber or Epsom salts, the Kensington Wells House was built by John Wright, ‘a doctor of physick’, on the site of Campden Hill Square. Queen Anne’s son William was lodged at Campden House and Lord Craven’s house by the Gravel Pits, in a futile attempt to prevent him dying young.
1711 The Gravel Pits Almshouses were established between Church Street and the Kensington Mall in Greyhounds Row. After Jonathan Swift took lodgings in the area in 1712-13 before writing ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, Notting Hill peaked as a health resort of the famous in 1727 when Isaac Newton died on Kensington Church Street, on the site of Newton House, in what was then known as Pitt’s and Orbell’s Buildings. It was here that Newton first told his falling apple story to explain gravity to William Stukeley. The Kensington Wells spa house became the Notting Hill Villa of the secretary of state for war Edward Lloyd.
1714 As George I succeeded Anne one of his new Whig government’s first unpopular acts authorised the collection of tolls ‘for repairing and amending the highways between Tyburn and Uxbridge.’
1716 In the early 18th century Holland House completed its geopolitical transformation from Tory to Whig when Charlotte Rich nee Myddleton, the widow of the 2nd Earl of Warwick and Holland, married Joseph Addison, the great Whig politician and poet who established the Spectator magazine and the area’s liberal reputation after Henry Rich’s earlier democratic leanings. In Edward Walford’s Addison eulogy, ‘by linking with the associations of Kensington the memory of that illustrious man has invested with a classic halo the groves and shades of Holland House.’ Addison was only in residence for 3 years when he was Secretary of State, between the Old Pretender Jacobite rebellion and the South Sea company crash. ‘Yet there, in Holland House, he lived and wrote, nevertheless, with a literary glory about his name which never can desert the place.’ According to tradition Joseph Addison’s local was the White Horse Tavern at the south end of Holland House Lane (Walk), which became the Holland Arms.
1726 After Addison Holland House went into a period of physical and moral decline. As a British fleet was sent to blockade Porto Belo in central America, the leasehold of the house was taken up by the notorious Whig Paymaster General Henry Fox. As Leslie Mitchell put it in his Holland House history, ‘the arrival of the Fox family did nothing to raise the property’s reputation’; but, at the same time, they founded the local state of ‘independence, individuality and being set apart from the mainstream.’ Henry Fox’s royalist father Stephen helped Charles II escape after the battle of Worcester and became his forces paymaster. His elder brother Stephen was another politician who was made Earl of Ilchester, and his descendants would eventually come into Holland House. The political career of Henry Fox was just as controversial and contradictory as that of Henry Rich. Having started out a Tory, he went over to the dominant Whigs under Sir Robert Walpole, ‘the first prime minister’, and then went back to the Tories.
1739 Robert Walpole’s Whig government was finally brought to an end in the 1740s by a war with Spain over shipping rights. The conflict was sparked by an incident in which a British captain, suspected of smuggling, reputedly had his ear torn off by the commander of a Spanish boarding party. The highlight of ‘the War of Jenkins’ Ear’ was the 1739 battle of Porto Belo, on the isthmus of Darien (now Panama), in which the Spanish stronghold was taken by a fleet under the command of Admiral Edward Vernon.
1740 When news of the victory reached Britain the following year it caused much jubilation, largely because it meant the end of Walpole’s Whigs. The song ‘Rule Britannia’ was inspired by Vernon’s victory, bonfires were lit, medallions struck and places named in honour of the event. Thus, according to Thomas Faulkner’s 1820 ‘History and Antiquities of Kensington’ explanation, the local farmer Abraham Adams came up with the name for his new farmhouse.
The Edinburgh Portobello beach acquired its name from members of Vernon’s crew who bought the land.
There’s also a Durham Portobello and Dublin has a Portobello dock. In the previous century Porto Belo had been taken by the pirate Captain Morgan. In the war of Jenkins’ Ear the Spanish soon retook the port and Vernon was defeated in the battle of Cartagena.
1741 Recruitment for the British war effort in New York caused a multi-racial uprising of Africans, Irish and Spanish prisoners known as ‘the Slave Plot’. With some historical irony, in the 20th century the Portobello farmland, named in patriotic celebration of the war, would be occupied by Afro-Caribbean, Irish and Spanish communities. Vernon Yard mews on Portobello Road hosted the pop pirate of the Caribbean Richard Branson’s Virgin record company in the 1970s and 80s including the Frontline reggae label. The Portobello Star pub at the end of the Admiral Vernon antiques market buildings was named in allusion to the fleet’s flagship. Vernon was also responsible for the word ‘grog’: due to his reputation for watering down rum supplies, he was nicknamed ‘Old Grog’ after his Grogram coat referring to his stinginess and the term was transferred to the beverage. In Porto Belo, Panama, the descendants of escaped African slaves have a Lent carnival in March.
1745 A few years after the battle of Porto Belo, at the time of the Bonnie Prince Charlie Jacobite rebellion, the Portobello farm is conspicuous by its absence from Jon Rocque’s ‘Environs of London’ map. Where it would be, at the end of the unnamed wide lane from the Gravel Pits cottages, where a path (following the route of Colville Road, All Saints Road and Bevington Road) intersects, is a blank space; possibly a building site. The Portobello path seems to have been referred to as Green Lane, despite Mr Greene’s farm lane to the west, and the Westbourne Green Lane from Shaftsbury House to the east. In Thomas Faulkner’s retrospective depiction of 18th century Notting Hill, written as urbanisation began: ‘The ascent near Holland House is clothed with wood, and affords a variety of picturesque views… The valley on the north is laid down with grass, and the whole district appears to have undergone but little alteration, in respect to culture and division, for several ages. Although the distance from London is scarcely 3 miles, yet the traveller may imagine himself to be embosomed in the most sequestered part of the country, and nothing is heard but the notes of the lark, the linnet or the nightingale… In the midst of these meadows stands the manor house of Knotting Barns.’
The rural tranquillity was, however, already being disturbed by a vibrant pub scene on the road. Edward Walford imagined: ‘As in most of the suburbs of London which lay along the main roads, so here the various inns and taverns would appear to have shown by their signs a tendency to the sports of the road, for within a short distance we find the Black Lion, the Swan, the Feathers, the Nag’s Head, the Horse and Groom, and the Coach and Horses, many of which, no doubt were, half a century ago, the resorts of highwaymen when they had done a little business on the Uxbridge or the Harrow Road, and which, if their mute walls could speak, might tell many a tale of coaches robbed, and the plunder shared between the ‘knights of the road’ and obliging landlords.’ The Coach and Horses on the site of 108 Notting Hill High Street and the George Inn at 61 Church Street ‘were known to harbour these gentry.’ The Bayswater Road stretch of the highway between Tyburn and the Kensington Gravel Pits was described in a Turnpike Act preamble as ‘frequently infested in the night time with robbers and other wicked and evil-disposed persons, and robberies, outrages, and violences are committed thereon, which might in a great measure be prevented if the said highway was properly lighted and watched.’
1748 As a deterrent to the ‘beggars and other undesirable characters’ who lurked around the coach stop at the Norlands bridge over Counter’s Creek, two highwaymen were hanged on wasteland on the site of Woodstock Grove, to the south west of Shepherd’s Bush roundabout. This area became known as Gallows Close as part of the scaffold remained there for the rest of the 18th century. Further along the Uxbridge Road there was another gallows and a gibbet cage at Starch Green. The Duke of Clarence pub (which survived until the end of the 20th century) on the south east side of Shepherd’s Bush roundabout still retained its ‘old-world character, with sign post and stone mounting blocks.’ In the 1730s Dick Turpin was said to have been active on the Harrow Road, if only in the 1834 ‘Rookwood’ novel by William Harrison Ainsworth, who lived at Kensal Lodge.
1749 Horace Walpole, the gothic novelist son of the first prime minister, wrote of being shot at by the highwaymen Plunket and McLean: ‘As I was returning from Holland House by moonlight, about 10 O’clock, I was attacked by two highwaymen in Hyde Park, and the pistol of one of them going off accidentally, raised the skin under my eye, left some marks of soot in my face, stunned me. The ball went through the top of the chariot, and if I had sat an inch nearer to the left side, must have gone through my head.’ As romanticised in the 1999 film ‘Plunkett and MacLeane’, ‘the fashionable highwayman’ McLean, a former grocer, and his journeyman apothecary sidekick Plunket, also held up the coaches of Lord Eglinton, Sir Thomas Robinson and Mrs Talbot, and ‘carried off a blunderbuss belonging to the Scotch earl’ along the Uxbridge Road.
1750 McLean was arrested after selling a stolen lace waistcoat to a pawnbroker. His lodgings were duly raided and found to contain a wardrobe of clothes, 23 purses, the blunderbuss and ‘a famous kept mistress.’ This prompted Soame Jenyns to write in ‘The Modern Fine Lady’ poem, ‘She weeps if but a handsome thief is hung’, with a note that ‘some of the brightest eyes were at this time in tears over one McLean, condemned for robbery on the highway.’ As McLean swung from the Tyburn ‘tree of liberty’, along the highway the ‘Old Kensington Notting Hill’ etchings depict a quaint rural scene of farmers, a country lane and a pond with a pig in the foreground.
1751 Two gentlemen were relieved of their timepieces and money near Holland House by bandits wearing black masks, ‘who swore a great deal and appeared to be in liquor.’
1753 A footpad attacked two travellers around the site of Lancaster Gate, where trees overhung the wall of Kensington Gardens: ‘On making resistance, he ran an iron skewer into the body of one of the men, and got off, though pursued by the other. The man who was stabbed lay dangerously ill at a publick house at Bayswater.’
1769 As the Turnpike Act came into operation, another traveller was robbed of £5 and some silver on the road near Holland House.
1774 After the Tyburn appearance of ‘the fashionable highwayman’ McLean, the more celebrated, ‘16-string Jack’ Rann finally ended up there for another Uxbridge Road-North Highway robbery. Rann, the most dandy highwayman of them all, was cited for his ‘remarkable foppery’ and known as ‘16-string Jack’ due to the bunches of 8 strings he attached to his breeches, said to allude to the number of times he had been tried and acquitted. Rann’s last victim, Dr William Bell testified that ‘as he was riding near Ealing, he observed two men of rather mean appearance, who rode past him; and that he remarked they had suspicious looks: yet neither at that time, nor for some time afterwards, had he any idea of being robbed: that soon afterwards, one of them, which he believed was Rann, crossed the head of his horse, and demanding his money, said “Give it to me, and take no notice, or I’ll blow your brains out.” On this time the doctor gave him one shilling and sixpence, which was all the silver he had, and likewise a common watch in a tortoise-shell case.’ 16-string Jack was finally arrested in an inn at Shepherd’s Bush, reputed to have been the only house between Acton and Kensington Gravel Pits.
1767-88 On the whole most local crime in the 18th century was of a more mundane agricultural nature, ranging from orchard and poultry theft to strange cattle rustling and sheep dismemberment. As illustrated in the Letters and Journals of Lady Mary Coke, the original Notting Hill gossip columnist known as ‘the white cat’, in the years leading up to the French Revolution there still wasn’t much going on in the area apart from property dealing and the occasional mugging. The highlights of her time at the Notting Hill Villa, then renamed in de Vere allusion Aubrey House, were: hearing the pistol retort as a highwayman was shot on the road; her neighbour Mrs Lahoop being robbed; footpads attempting to strip another woman; her coachman getting drunk at Lord Spencer’s and driving into a flooded ditch; a neighbour dispute with Mr Phillimore; and once meeting ‘women who had been working in the fields, and they talked to me not very civilly, I thought.’
In 1760 two large parcels of land north of the road, the equivalent of two large farms, including Notting Wood, were in the possession of Richard Ladbroke. Like the Rich family, the Ladbrokes hailed from Warwickshire and owned other lands in Middlesex, Essex and Surrey. Sir Robert Ladbroke, Richard’s brother, or possibly father, was a goldsmith, banker, MP and Lord Mayor in 1747. The Ladbroke horse racing betting company takes its name from the training stables at Ladbroke Hall in Warwickshire, and isn’t connected with the subsequent racecourse on the Ladbroke estate in Notting Hill. The next most influential name in the locality, Talbot, seems to predate Ladbroke as the family probably acquired Notting Barns from the Andersons in the early 18th century. The founding father of the Talbot Earls of Shrewsbury, whose country seat was Whitchurch in Shropshire, fought against Joan of Arc in the 15th century.
The Arnolds’ and Greens’ Northland House was succeeded by Norland House, the Prince of Wales (later George IV)’s military academy, run by the ‘professor of artillery and fortifications’ Thomas Marquois. This property was acquired in 1794 by the Swiss clockmaker Lewis Vulliamy, and became the site of the celebrated ‘Mr Vulliamy (Lewis’s son Benjamin)’s overflowing well.’ This family are still represented in Notting Hill by the journalist Ed Vulliamy. The Arnold family also maintained a presence in the area; in the 19th century one crops up as a pig keeper and in the 20th century the TV series ‘Steptoe and Son’ was inspired by the Arnold rag and bone men. The short-lived Notting Hill farm, thought to have been on the hilltop by Loftie; but probably on the site of the Mitre Tavern at 40 Holland Park Avenue; was let in 1763 by Richard Ladbroke to the Halls, who in turn sub-let the property to Colonel Lowther, and another house to Lord Valencia. James Watson acquired 17 acres at the northern extremity of the Norlands estate as a brickfield in 1781 and the first ‘poor buildings’ appeared in the area.