Ladbroke Square and the Secret Gardens
Why is it significant?
Peer through the railings at the long stretch of lawns and huge plane trees in front of you. It looks like a public park, but try the gate and you will find it locked. This is Ladbroke Square garden, one of the biggest private squares in London, and only the residents around it hold a key.
Key Facts
| Place | Ladbroke Square and the Secret Gardens |
|---|---|
| Address | Ladbroke Square, London W11 3ND, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.51060, -0.20260 |
| Part of Walk | Racecourse, Carnival and the Blue Door: Hidden Notting Hill & Portobello Road, London |
| Generated | Generated |
Peer through the railings at the long stretch of lawns and huge plane trees in front of you. It looks like a public park, but try the gate and you will find it locked. This is Ladbroke Square garden, one of the biggest private squares in London, and only the residents around it hold a key.
All this land belonged to the Ladbroke family, and in the 1820s and 30s James Weller Ladbroke began to turn his fields into a new suburb. The idea that made the estate special was the communal garden. Instead of houses facing a square across a road, many terraces here were built with their back doors opening straight onto a shared private garden. From the street you see only fronts of white stucco; behind them, invisible, lie green rooms the size of football pitches.
The dream did not come cheap, and it did not come quickly. Notting Hill was built by speculators borrowing heavily, and when money ran out in the financial crashes of the nineteenth century, whole streets stood half finished for years, shells of houses with no roofs, slowly weathering among the weeds. Several builders went bankrupt before the elegant grid you see was finally complete.
These hidden gardens have a famous screen moment. In the film Notting Hill, Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts climb over a fence at night into a locked communal garden and find a bench with a memorial plaque. That scene was filmed in Rosmead Gardens, a few streets north of here, one of the same family of private squares. And the bench idea came from a real tradition: residents still dedicate benches to neighbours who loved these gardens.
So the most beautiful parts of Notting Hill are the ones you cannot quite see. Walk to the western end of the square and turn right up Ladbroke Grove, towards the church spire that marks the top of the hill... and the site of a forgotten racecourse.