Racecourse, Carnival and the Blue Door: Hidden Notting Hill & Portobello Road, London

From a Victorian theatre at the old tollgate to a Brutalist tower on Golborne Road: a lost racecourse, Orwell's cold lodgings, the birth of Carnival and the street a film made famous

London · 11 stops · 26 min audio · Generated

  1. 1. The Coronet at Notting Hill Gate

    103 Notting Hill Gate, London W11 3LB, United Kingdom

    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.

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

    22 Portobello Road, London W11 3DH, United Kingdom

    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.

  3. 3. The Antiques Mile of Portobello Market

    Portobello Road at Westbourne Grove, London W11 2DY, United Kingdom

    Here the street suddenly fills up: arcades with low doorways, trestle tables of silver spoons, brass telescopes, old maps, cameras, teacups and military medals, and a slow river of people drifting between them. If you are here on a Saturday, you are standing in one of the largest antiques markets anywhere in the world.

    It did not start with antiques at all. As the new houses of Notting Hill filled up in the second half of the nineteenth century, costermongers set up barrows of fruit, vegetables and fish along the road to feed them, and by the end of Queen Victoria's reign Portobello was a busy everyday market. Some of the food stalls further north are the direct descendants of those barrows.

    The antiques came after the Second World War. London's great junk and curiosity market in Islington, the Caledonian Market, closed when war broke out and never reopened in its old form, and some of its dealers drifted west to Portobello. By the 1950s and 60s collectors, young designers and film crews were hunting bargains here, and the arcades multiplied until, on a good Saturday, more than a thousand dealers set out their wares, by some counts.

    Look closely at the stalls and you will see the market's unwritten rules. The serious traders arrive in the half-light, very early, and the best pieces often change hands between dealers long before the first tourist arrives. Haggling is expected... politely.

    And Portobello has a famous fictional resident. In Michael Bond's books, Paddington Bear's dear friend Mr Gruber keeps an antique shop on Portobello Road, where the bear from darkest Peru drops in for buns and cocoa. The films brought him back to these very pavements, and you will spot Paddington peering out of more than one shop window. Now leave the market for a moment: turn left, westward, into the quieter streets of the Ladbroke estate, towards the great green garden squares hidden behind the houses.

  4. 4. Ladbroke Square and the Secret Gardens

    Ladbroke Square, London W11 3ND, United Kingdom

    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.

  5. 5. St John's Notting Hill and the Lost Hippodrome

    Lansdowne Crescent, London W11 2NN, United Kingdom

    Stand by the church on its little green island and feel the ground: you are on the very top of Notting Hill. St John's was built here in the 1840s, and the streets around it bend in long, graceful curves... which is your first clue to what this hilltop was before.

    In 1837, the year Queen Victoria came to the throne, an entrepreneur called John Whyte leased around a hundred and forty acres of these fields and opened the Hippodrome, a racecourse that he hoped would rival Epsom and Ascot, right on the edge of London. The track looped around the hill, and this summit, with its sweeping view, was the natural grandstand where crowds gathered to watch the horses thunder past below.

    It was a disaster almost from the start. An old public footpath crossed the course, and the people of the neighbouring Potteries, a poor district of brick makers and pig keepers, refused to give up their right of way. They cut through the fences and wandered across the track during the races. Worse, the soil was heavy clay, and after rain the horses sank into it. Jockeys complained, the gentry stayed away, and the last race was run in 1841.

    The land was handed over to builders, and the church went up on the old spectators' hill in 1845. Look at the map of the streets around you: Lansdowne Crescent and its neighbours sweep round in arcs, and it is often said they follow the ghost of the racetrack. Historians argue about how exactly the old course lay, but walking these curves, you can easily imagine the hoofbeats.

    A few steps along Lansdowne Crescent there is a sadder memory. At the Samarkand Hotel, at number 22, Jimi Hendrix died on 18 September 1970, at just twenty-seven years old. Fans still come quietly to stand outside. Now walk a little further north along Ladbroke Grove and turn right into Blenheim Crescent, which curves gently downhill back to Portobello Road and an old picture palace.

  6. 6. The Electric Cinema and Blenheim Crescent

    191 Portobello Road, London W11 2ED, United Kingdom

    Stop in front of the white and red Edwardian facade with the word Electric across the top. It looks like a theatre from a toy box, and that is roughly what it was meant to be: a palace for a brand new invention.

    The Electric was built in 1910, in the first great rush of purpose-built picture houses, when films were silent, short and accompanied by a piano. Most of its rivals have long since been demolished or turned into supermarkets and churches. This one survived, and it is counted among the oldest working cinemas in Britain, now listed for its architecture. Its name was a boast: in 1910, electric light and electric pictures were thrilling modern magic.

    It has had dark days, too. There is a story often told about the place, that during the First World War its manager was German-born, and a suspicious crowd accused him of signalling to Zeppelin raiders from the roof... an accusation as absurd as it was frightening. Much later, by the 1980s and 90s, the old place was struggling, and it closed its doors before a careful restoration brought it back, in 2001, with leather armchairs and even a few beds in the front row.

    Now look along Blenheim Crescent, the side street right beside you. For years there was a small specialist travel bookshop there, and it gave the screenwriter Richard Curtis the idea for William Thacker's failing travel bookshop in Notting Hill. In the film, a Hollywood star walks in to buy a book about Turkey, and William's life turns upside down. The real shop closed in 2011, but for a while it was one of the most photographed bookshops on earth, thanks to a shop that never existed.

    The crescent itself is one more of those curves that wind down from the hilltop you just left. From here, carry on north along Portobello Road for a short way, then turn right into Colville Terrace and head to a pair of Victorian squares with a wild 1960s past.

  7. 7. Powis Square: Rachman, Pink Floyd and Performance

    Powis Square, London W11 2AY, United Kingdom

    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.

  8. 8. Westbourne Park Road: The Blue Door

    Westbourne Park Road, London W11 1EH, United Kingdom

    Stroll along this ordinary residential street of painted terraces and quiet front gardens. These are private homes, so enjoy them from the pavement. But for millions of film fans, one front door on this road is as famous as any palace gate in London.

    In the 1999 film Notting Hill, Hugh Grant's character William lives behind a bright blue door, and it is through that door that he stumbles out, half dressed, into a crowd of photographers. The door was real. It belonged to a house the screenwriter Richard Curtis had once lived in, and he wrote what he knew: his neighbourhood, his market, his corner shop, his friends' cluttered kitchens.

    Fame is not always kind to a front door. After the film came out, fans queued to be photographed in front of it, and the original was later sold. Its replacement has changed colour more than once since then... and the residents of this street have developed an impressive patience with strangers holding phones.

    The film's most celebrated sequence was shot just round the corner on Portobello Road. William walks the length of the market in what looks like one continuous shot, while the seasons change around him: summer stalls, autumn rain, winter snow, spring blossom, as if a whole year passes in a single stroll. It took careful planning, fake snow and a little help from the special effects team, a small piece of movie magic made from a very real street.

    The film has its critics. Many people pointed out that its Notting Hill was strangely missing the Caribbean community that had shaped this neighbourhood for half a century, people whose music and courage you will meet at the next stop. It is a fair point, and a good reason to keep walking. Walk back east along Westbourne Park Road, across Portobello Road, and turn north into All Saints Road, a short street with a very big story.

  9. 9. All Saints Road: The Mangrove and the Birth of Carnival

    8 All Saints Road, London W11 1HH, United Kingdom

    Walk slowly down All Saints Road, a short row of shops and cafés with flats above. It is calm now. But this little street is one of the most important places in the history of Black Britain.

    In the late summer of 1958, gangs of white youths roamed Notting Hill attacking West Indian residents, smashing windows and hurling petrol bombs. The riots lasted for days. A few months later, in May 1959, a young Antiguan carpenter named Kelso Cochrane was stabbed to death on a nearby street, and his killers were never convicted. More than a thousand people came to his funeral.

    The answer from the community was music. The Trinidad-born journalist and activist Claudia Jones organised a Caribbean carnival in January 1959, indoors, at St Pancras Town Hall, to lift spirits and show off West Indian culture. Then in 1966 a local community worker, Rhaune Laslett, organised a street festival for the neighbourhood, and a steel band led by Russell Henderson walked out into the streets, drawing people behind it. From those beginnings grew the Notting Hill Carnival, which now fills these streets every August bank holiday weekend and draws more than a million people, one of the largest street festivals in Europe.

    In 1968 Frank Crichlow opened a Caribbean restaurant at number 8, called the Mangrove. It became a meeting place for activists, artists and writers. It also became a police target, raided again and again. In 1970 the community marched in protest, and nine people, among them Darcus Howe and Altheia Jones-LeCointe, were charged with riot. At the Old Bailey in 1971 the Mangrove Nine defended themselves, and all were cleared of the main charge... and the judge remarked that the trial had shown evidence of racial hatred. The story is told in Steve McQueen's 2020 film Mangrove.

    Claudia Jones is buried in Highgate Cemetery, just to the left of Karl Marx. Now carry on to the end of the road, turn left along Tavistock Road and head back to Portobello Road, towards the great concrete roadway you can hear humming ahead of you.

  10. 10. Under the Westway

    Portobello Road under the Westway, London W10 5TZ, United Kingdom

    Step under the great concrete deck roaring above you and let your eyes adjust to the shade. This is the Westway, the elevated motorway that carries traffic into central London on legs of concrete, and underneath it, instead of the usual gloom, you find market stalls, studios, cafés and football pitches.

    The Westway opened in July 1970, about two and a half miles of road on stilts, at the time one of the longest continuous elevated roads in Britain. To build it, hundreds of homes were demolished, and the carriageway passed so close to some of the survivors that people could almost touch the lorries from their bedroom windows. On opening day, as a government minister drove along it, residents of Acklam Road hung a banner from their houses demanding to be rehoused and taken out of what they called hell.

    Out of that anger came something remarkable. Local campaigners demanded that the scraps of land underneath be handed back to the community, and in 1971 a trust was set up to do exactly that. Today around twenty acres under the motorway are home to markets, a climbing centre, stables, sports pitches, artists' studios and charities. It is one of the most imaginative pieces of urban recycling in London.

    The Westway also wrote itself into music. In the late 1970s the punk band The Clash, whose singer Joe Strummer lived in this area, sang about the road and were photographed beneath it, and its concrete became a symbol of a restless, grimy, creative London. During Carnival, the sound systems under and around these pillars make the whole structure throb with bass.

    Look up at the underside of the deck and think about it: a road built to rush people past this neighbourhood, now its shelter, its marketplace and its playground. From here, walk north on Portobello Road to Golborne Road and look up... you cannot miss the last stop of the walk.

  11. 11. Golborne Road and Trellick Tower

    Trellick Tower, Golborne Road, London W10 5PA, United Kingdom

    Lift your eyes above the cafés of Golborne Road to the concrete giant on the skyline, with its slim separate tower of lifts joined to the main block by bridges, like a ladder leaning on a wall. That is Trellick Tower, and love it or hate it, nobody walks past it without an opinion.

    Golborne Road first. In the 1960s and 70s Moroccan and Portuguese families settled here, and the street still smells of mint tea, grilled sardines and custard tarts. Locals sometimes call it Little Morocco. It is the unpolished end of Portobello, where the market spills over into furniture, bric-a-brac and second-hand everything.

    Trellick Tower was designed by the Hungarian-born architect Ernő Goldfinger and completed in 1972, thirty-one storeys of social housing. Goldfinger was obsessed with light and space. The flats are split over two levels, so the corridors only need to run on every third floor, and almost every home gets windows on both sides. All the noisy machinery, lifts and rubbish chutes went into that separate service tower, crowned by a boiler house that looks like a sci-fi radio mast.

    For years it had a terrible reputation. Vandalism, crime and broken lifts earned it the nickname the Tower of Terror, and Goldfinger's dream seemed to have failed. Then the residents themselves fought back, forming an association and pushing for a concierge and proper security. In 1998 the tower was listed at Grade II star, and the flats that nobody wanted became some of the most sought-after addresses for lovers of modern architecture.

    And Goldfinger left one more mark. The story goes that Ian Fleming disliked his modernist houses in Hampstead, and borrowed his surname for the gold-obsessed villain of a certain spy novel. The architect was not amused. So your walk ends as it began, with a building that refused to disappear: from a Victorian theatre to a concrete tower, Notting Hill keeps reinventing itself.