Everybody has heard the name Notting Hill, right? Fun fact: the earliest account of the name actually comes from the Patent Rolls of 1356 which lists the area as “Knottynghull”.
Notting Hill is a cute, fancy looking area located in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. However, before becoming this iconic place, it was largely inhabited by the working-class, at least until the rich people moved in, and Richard Curtis made the neighborhood popular with his film starring Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts.
Late-Twentieth Century gentrification transformed Notting Hill into what it is today, meaning full of people with money, bookshops, and antique dealers.
Old or new, there are plenty of interesting things to know about one of London’s most famous districts.
Here are some interesting facts about Notting Hill!
Did you know that the name Portobello (from the famous Portobello Road, home to the best vintage and antiques markets of London) actually honors the capture of Puerto Bello from the Spaniards in 1739? Hosting these truly famous markets (yes, plural), Portobello Road offers an endless array of antiques, from glasses to maps. Be warned, you probably will get lost looking through the vast array of shops and stalls, but it is totally worth it and the only way to discover something absolutely amazing within the carnage.
We all have seen them, those colourful houses on Lancaster Road! They are a beautiful mix of pastel colours which bring the most positive vibes to anyone just walking down the street. This picture-perfect sight makes for an iconic part of the London visuals, with some of the prettiest and most scenic streets in London, just this street is reason enough to visit Notting Hill.
One more fun fact: have you ever seen that famous blue door? Do you remember it? That’s the exterior of 280 Westbourne Grove, (which has since been auctioned off, for obvious reasons) chosen as the location of Hugh Grant’s apartment in the 1999 film Notting Hill. But the real interior is a mystery, because it was actually a set built in a studio!
There are just so many reasons to stay here, and if you don’t, you should at least pay a visit! We recommend you bring a big shopping bag and comfortable shoes, just a friendly advice for you.
Another wonderful feature of this neighborhood are the bookshops.
Notting Hill has some of the best bookshops in a two-block radius than the entirety of London has across the whole city. You can find everything and anything: from a shop only dedicated to cook books (smartly called Books for Cooks), and The Notting Hill Bookshop as just two basic examples. We suggest you just wander around these streets and you’ll surely find plenty to peruse.
Notting Hill Mewsare just what you need to escape that modern, busy metropolis look
(you might even say… the London look).
But what are they? Built in the 18th and 19th century, a mews (singular) is a small street or yard, usually cobbled, and normally built behind some of London’s most famous streets and squares. In spite of what their use is today, mews were not originally intended as houses; in fact, most mews houses started their humble life as stables for the horses and carriages of the landed gentry with rooms above for stable boys, and they obvioulìsly look very pretty and characteristic – there is a reason if they are considered London’s hidden gems!
One of London’s best known Mews is located precisely in Notting Hill – the St Luke’s Mews. There actually are plenty of these Mews located in Notting Hill and each has their own unique character and is definitely worth a visit. I would especially recommend visiting it in spring, as the flowers bloom and you can get all these beautiful smells that are hard to find in the midst of a trafficked city like this.
(Yup, you have seen this one in Love Actually.)
Where does their particular name come from? They were called ‘mews’ after the Royal Mews, a gigantic stable built on what is now Trafalgar Square that hosted the King’s falcons; funnily enough, if you consider the distinct difference, from this moment stables in general became known as a mews, and the word turned into the ubiquitous name for all service homes.
We already mentioned Westbourne Grove, where The Blue Door From The Film is.
Westbourne Grove, main road in Notting Hill, is a retail road running across the whole neighborhood: its western end is in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and its eastern end is in the City of Westminster; it goes from Kensington Park Road in the west to Queensway in the east, crossing over the aforementioned Portobello Road.
The road was created in the late 1830s and soon extended. Cottages and villas lined both sides and most of these had front gardens.
From the mid-1850s shops began to replace the houses. And after a rough start that saw it dubbed “Bankruptcy Road”,William Whiteley opened his first little shop here in 1863. Whiteley proved to be a very astute merchant and by 1876 he had acquired 15 adjacent shops, creating London’s first ‘great emporium’.
Today, its sidewalk coasts some of the best restaurants and cafés in London, and it also has some of the best independent shops for quality clothing. The street offers an upmarket, boutique shopping experience. If you love designer clothes and high-end shopping then Westbourne Grove is the ideal place to do it.
The place is not much too touristy, which makes it a pleasant stroll instead of a long, crowded and stressful queue to an imprecise destination. And don’t get us wrong, the English famously love queues, as long as they have a reasonable cause to exist. This wouldn’t.
You may notice that there is a lot of Ladbroke here, Ladbroke there, Ladbroke everywhere: if you are curious why so many of the streets of Notting Hill bear the Ladbroke name, well, the reason is fairly simple: they are named after the family that owned most of the land when it was redeveloped in the 19th century.
More specifically, Ladbroke Grove is the center of it all: Ladbroke Grove was an absolute centre of the British counterculture in the 1960s. The area was even blacklisted for development following 1958 Notting Hill race riots, and consequently found favour with individuals who distrusted authority, moving into unmodernised Victorian properties along the road. Just so you know, in 1977, a brief encounter between musicians Phil Collins and Steve Hackett on Ladbroke Grove finalised the latter’s departure from the progressive rock band Genesis. Just saying.
It’s time for the Notting Hill Carnival!
The Carnival is London’s biggest street party, filling the streets with Caribbean colours, music and flavours for two days every August. Immerse among the elaborate floats and costumed performers winding and dancing along the streets in the carnival parade, give into the thrum and join them dancing to the sound of steel bands and calypso music, and visit the tempting food stalls along the route.
A bit of much-needed history!
The roots of the Notting Hill Carnival that took shape in the mid-1960s had two separate but connected strands. First strand, the “Caribbean Carnival” held on 30 January 1959 in St Pancras Town Hall as a response to the problematic state of race relations at the time; The 1959 event, held indoors and televised by the BBC, was organised by the Trinidadian journalist and activist Claudia Jones (“the mother of the Notting Hill Carnival”) editor of influential black newspaper The West Indian Gazette.
Another important strand was the “hippie” London Free School-inspired festival in Notting Hill that became the first organised outside event, in August 1966. The prime mover was Rhaune Laslett, who was not aware of the indoor events when she first raised the idea. This festival was a more diverse Notting Hill event to promote cultural unity. A street party for neighbourhood children turned into a carnival procession when Russell Henderson’s steel band (who had played at the earlier Claudia Jones events) went on a walkabout. By 1970, “the Notting Hill Carnival” consisted of 2 music bands, the Russell Henderson Combo and Selwyn Baptiste’s Notting Hill Adventure Playground Steelband and 500 dancing spectators.
Now this next section is for the true crime lovers, so maybe if you aren’t one, it’s not very much for you because… it’s not the calmest.
If you are into true crime, the name John Christie should definitely ring a bell, and you might already know that the infamous serial killer was in fact a resident of Notting Hill and a projectionist at the Commodore Cinema (then Electric Palace) during World War II. (You should definitely visit it, and catch a screening – don’t worry, I think the new hiring manager is doing a much better job now). Known to his family and friends as Reg Christie, he was an English serial killer and alleged necrophile active during the 1940s and early 1950s. Christie murdered at least eight people—including his wife, Ethel—by strangling them in his flat at 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill, London. The bodies of three of Christie’s victims were found in a wallpaper-covered kitchen alcove soon after he had moved out of Rillington Place during March 1953. The remains of two more victims were discovered in the garden, and his wife’s body was found beneath the floorboards of the front room. Christie was arrested and convicted of his wife’s murder, for which he was hanged.