The Coronet at Notting Hill Gate

Why is it significant?

Find the pale building with the little dome on its corner, wedged between the shopfronts of Notting Hill Gate like a grand old lady waiting for a bus. That is the Coronet, and it has been entertaining this busy road since 1898. The name of the street is a fossil.

Key Facts

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Find the pale building with the little dome on its corner, wedged between the shopfronts of Notting Hill Gate like a grand old lady waiting for a bus. That is the Coronet, and it has been entertaining this busy road since 1898. The name of the street is a fossil. For well over a century a turnpike gate stood across this road, the old highway west out of London towards Uxbridge and Oxford, and every coach, cart and drove of cattle paid to get through. Around it there was not much of a hill town at all... farmland, gravel pits, brick kilns and a notorious colony of pig keepers to the west. The gate was taken down in 1864, but the name refused to leave, and the Central line station that opened in 1900 fixed it on the map for good. The Coronet itself was designed by W. G. R. Sprague, the architect behind several West End playhouses, and it opened as a proper theatre for the smart new suburb. Touring companies brought their productions out from the West End, and the theatre's own history counts Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt among the stars who played here. Then the moving pictures arrived. By the 1920s the stage had given way to a screen, and for most of the next century this was a neighbourhood picture house, where generations of locals queued on the pavement for the Saturday show. If it feels familiar, you may already have been inside without leaving your sofa. In the 1999 film Notting Hill, Hugh Grant's lovesick bookseller slips into the Coronet to watch a film starring the Hollywood actress he cannot stop thinking about. A real local cinema, playing itself, in a romantic comedy about the very street it stands on. Buildings like this vanished all over London as multiplexes took over, and the Coronet came close more than once. Instead, in the 2010s the projectors fell silent and it returned to its first life as a stage, now known as the Coronet Theatre. A full circle in a little over a century... Now cross the road and head north up Pembridge Road, to the point where it hands you over to the most famous market street in west London.