Powis Square: Rachman, Pink Floyd and Performance
Why is it significant?
Take in the tall white houses around this square, with their columned porches, and the children's playground in the middle. It looks respectable, prosperous, a little sleepy. Seventy years ago, you would hardly have recognised it.
Key Facts
| Place | Powis Square: Rachman, Pink Floyd and Performance |
|---|---|
| Address | Powis Square, London W11 2AY, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.51620, -0.20140 |
| Part of Walk | Racecourse, Carnival and the Blue Door: Hidden Notting Hill & Portobello Road, London |
| Generated | Generated |
Take in the tall white houses around this square, with their columned porches, and the children's playground in the middle. It looks respectable, prosperous, a little sleepy. Seventy years ago, you would hardly have recognised it.
These houses were built in the 1860s for comfortable Victorian families with servants. But by the 1950s they had been carved up into overcrowded rooms, and this corner of Notting Hill became one of the poorest in London. Many of the newcomers were Caribbean families who had answered Britain's call for workers, only to find signs refusing them lodgings. Into that gap stepped landlords like Peter Rachman, who bought up houses in these streets, packed in tenants and used intimidation to drive out the ones who had legal protection. His name entered the English dictionary: Rachmanism means the exploitation of tenants by an unscrupulous landlord.
Rachman died in 1962, but his story resurfaced a year later in the Profumo affair, the scandal that shook the government, because some of the young women at its centre had been closely connected to him.
Then the mood flipped. In 1966 a group of activists founded the London Free School around these streets, offering classes, advice and a community newspaper. To raise money they held concerts in the church hall of All Saints, just around the corner, featuring a young band hardly anyone had heard of... Pink Floyd. The light shows and long improvisations that made them famous were tested out on local audiences here.
And if a house on this square sends a shiver down your spine, you may be remembering a film. The exterior of number 25 played the crumbling hideout of a reclusive rock star in Performance, shot in 1968 with Mick Jagger. The playground came after local families campaigned to open the private garden to children at the end of the sixties. Now walk west along Talbot Road to Portobello Road, then a little north and left into Westbourne Park Road, for a front door with a story.