| Contents | Getting it Straight in Notting Hill Gate | The Hill of Dreams |
Arthur Machen, who lived on Clarendon Road in the 1880s, wrote the horror fantasy novels ‘The Great God Pan’, ‘The Hill of Dreams’ and ‘The Three Imposters’. He became best known during World War I when his short story ‘The Bowmen’ gave rise to ‘the angels of Mons’ legend, in which celestial archers bolstered the British ranks.
Machen was also a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, who met at 36 Blythe Road in Hammersmith, along with Aleister Crowley and WB Yeats. At the same time the notorious Russian occultist Madame Blavatsky was staying locally at 17 Lansdowne Crescent, where Yeats visited her, and 77 Elgin Crescent.
WB Yeats also frequented an occult temple at 46 and 56 Bassett Road. Arthur Machen recalled drifting around North Kensington and the phantasmagorical impression that Kensal Green cemetery had on him in his ‘Far Off Things’ autobiography:
‘I would sometimes pursue Clarendon Road northward and get into all sorts of regions of which I never had any clear notion. They are so obscure to me now, and a sort of nightmare. I see myself getting terribly entangled with a canal which seemed to cross my path in a manner contrary to the laws of reason. I turn a corner and am confronted with an awful cemetery, a terrible city of white gravestones and shattered marble pillars and granite urns, and every sort of horrid heathenry. This, I suppose, must have been Kensal Green: it added a new terror to death. I think I came upon Kensal Green again and again; it was like the Malay, an enemy for months. I would break off by way of Portobello Road and entangle myself in Notting Hill, and presently I would come across the goblin city; I might wander into the Harrow Road, but at last the ghost-stones would appal me. Maida Vale was treacherous, Paddington false – inevitably, it seemed my path led me to the detested habitation of the dead.’
In 1889 the Kensal Green funeral of William Wilkie Collins, of ‘The Woman in White’ and ‘The Moonstone’ detective novel fame, occasioned the first local case of fan mania with women in black fighting over wreaths at his graveside.
George Gissing, who lived on Wornington Road, across Ladbroke Grove from the cemetery, featured a Great Western Railway trainspotting scene at Westbourne Park in his ‘New Grub Street’ novel.
Oscar Wilde appeared at Westbourne Park station after his release from Reading gaol, to meet his wife and children who were staying on Westbourne Park Villas.
Arthur Conan Doyle featured Notting Hill in three of his Sherlock Holmes detective mysteries; in ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’, Seldon is ‘the Notting Hill murderer’, and in ‘The Red Circle’ Inspector Gregson treats a woman suspect ‘with as little sentiment as if she were a Notting Hill hooligan.’