Portobello Road Begins: Admiral Vernon and Orwell's Cold Room

Why is it significant?

Walk a few steps into Portobello Road and notice how calm it is: rows of pastel terraced houses, pink, lemon and sky blue, with hardly a stall in sight. The market is still ahead of you. This end of the street belongs to the people who live here.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk a few steps into Portobello Road and notice how calm it is: rows of pastel terraced houses, pink, lemon and sky blue, with hardly a stall in sight. The market is still ahead of you. This end of the street belongs to the people who live here.

So why does a lane in west London carry the name of a port in Panama? In November 1739 a British squadron under Admiral Edward Vernon captured Porto Bello, a Spanish treasure port on the Caribbean coast, with just six ships. Britain went wild with joy. Streets, pubs and even a whole district of Edinburgh were named Portobello, and a farmer out here christened his land Portobello Farm. For more than a century the road was simply the muddy track that led to it, through fields and hedges, until houses crept along it from the 1850s.

Vernon left another souvenir in the language. He wore a coat of grogram, a coarse fabric, and his sailors called him Old Grog... so when he ordered their daily rum to be watered down in 1740, the mixture became known as grog.

Now look for the blue plaque at number 22. In the winter of 1927, a tall young man called Eric Blair took a room here. He had just resigned from the Imperial Police in Burma, determined to become a writer, and the poet Ruth Pitter, a family friend, helped him find this lodging. She later remembered how cold the room was, and how he warmed his hands over a candle while he wrote. From here he set out, dressed in old clothes, to sleep in doss houses and tramp with the homeless... research for the book that would become Down and Out in Paris and London. By the time it was published in 1933, Eric Blair had a new name: George Orwell.

It is a lovely irony that the man who would warn the world about Big Brother began his writing life in one of London's most photographed streets. Keep walking north along Portobello Road, past the curve, and listen for the noise of the market growing louder.