Notting Hill (as seen on DVD)

This post is for all you people who might be thinking of visiting London and not want to partake in the usual "Oh, let's see Big Ben and Buckingham Palace" tourist malakee!

We will actually do this walk tomorrow, so on Monday there should be pictures about it.

The Walk

Distance: 3 miles approx
Type of walk: circular.

Starts and finishes at Notting Hill tube station (central, circle and district lines)
This walk is planned for a Saturday, which is the best time to explore the Portobello antiques market at the south end of Portobello Road, which only opens on Saturdays.

We come out of Notting Hill tube station on the north side of Notting Hill Gate and take the first right into Pembridge Road. We branch immediately left into Kensington Park Road and left again into Ladbroke Road past a row of delectable white stucco Victorian villas characteristic of the new affluent Notting Hill.
Turning right into Ladbroke Terrace we reach Ladbroke Square, one of many private garden squares in this area of London. Only residents of the tall Victorian houses in the square have keys to the three hectares of wooded gardens hidden behind iron railings in Ladbroke Square Gardens. We now turn left into Ladbroke Square with the gardens on our right and take a right into Ladbroke Grove, the area’s main traffic artery, and cross at the crossing into Lansdowne Crescent with St John’s Church on our right.
This and the sweeping surrounding crescents of stucco houses with carved Italianate buildings and pillared porches form the heart of the Ladbroke Estate. If you think the estate’s distinctive circular shape on the A-Z looks a bit like a racetrack, this is because it originally was. The area was opened as the Hippodrome racecourse in 1837 circling the hill, but the venture failed and the racecourse closed in 1841. The Ladbroke estate was developed on the land in the 1840s with the church marking the Hippodrome’s central point.

We now follow Lansdowne Crescent round to come out at Ladbroke Grove and walk northwards with the blue railway bridge carrying the tube over the road in front of us. Shops and streets quickly become dirtier and shabbier, with small ethnic supermarkets and takeaways, as we get nearer the Westway, the concrete motorway flyover which carves Notting Hill in two.
This is one of the few remnants of an ambitious scheme in the 1960s to build a series of ringways throughout London, with what is now the M25 as the outermost ring. But planners were stopped in their tracks in inner London by a combination of mounting costs and public outrage and the ringways were abandoned in the 1970s.
Now the spaces under the Westway are occupied by cafes, a fitness centre and the north end of Portobello Market.

We go under the Westway and turn immediately right into Cambridge Gardens, where you can see the Westway on our right, incongruous against the backdrop of Victorian terraces on our left. Then we turn left into Portobello Road past a clutch of furniture and antique clothing shops and right into Golborne Road. This is the shopping and cultural centre of the area’s Portuguese community, with the Lisbon Patisserie, Lisboa delicatessen and Café Oporto all busy with customers talking to each other in Portuguese.
We now turn right into Wornington Road and right into Malvern Close looking for a path leading half left past the Malvern pub and we keep ahead across the end of Acklam Road to pick up Portobello Road under the Westway.
The northern end of Portobello Road under the Westway is much less touristy and upmarket than the well-known antiques market further south but still worth exploring. Shops sell New Age and grunge clothes, pubs and cafes serve Thai food and Spanish wine, and market stalls sell a vast variety of fruit and vegetables.

Turning left into Lancaster Road we take the second right into All Saints Road. In the 1950s and 1960s, this and surrounding roads were slums, the large houses divided up into bed sits, many lived in by West Indians who had recently arrived in London. Tensions between whites, blacks and the police led to the Notting Hill riots of 1958 and continuing unrest throughout the 1960s.
All this is difficult to imagine now, looking at the multicoloured house fronts newly painted red, green, yellow and black, the elegant contemporary art galleries and furniture shops and offices of architects and designers. The only reminder of recent history is the People’s Sound record shop with reggae music blaring out of the door.

We now turn right into Westbourne Park Road and left into Portobello Road. This is where the shops get smarter and the Saturday antiques market starts with stalls out on the road in front of shops crammed with ‘objets d’art’ and collectibles. Blenheim Crescent off Portobello Road on our right is worth a detour to explore its eclectic selection of bookshops including The Travel Bookshop, famous as Hugh Grant’s bookshop in the film Notting Hill, and Books for Cooks. Coming back to Portobello Road, the lush interior of the Electric Cinema was restored in 2001 after years of neglect. The Electric has a Brasserie if we want to stop off for a meal or a drink. Otherwise Portobello Road and Blenheim Road have a wide choice of pubs, restaurants and takeaways.

We continue up Portobello Road to Westbourne Grove on our left, with its designer loo incorporating a flower stall on the island in the middle of the road. Westbourne Grove is lined with upmarket clothes chain stores including Whistles and Joseph, alongside bars and restaurants.
To return to Notting Hill Gate station and the end of the walk, we continue up Westbourne Grove and turn left into Pembridge Villas, which becomes Pembridge Road which leads back to the Notting Hill tube station.

Click on picture to enlarge!