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The Guide Book to Film Locations London |
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Portobello Road |
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Notting Hill If one thing makes Notting Hill unique, it's that it's one of the few London neighbourhoods to remain almost totally unchanged. The social profile of the residents has changed, true, but the look of the place is unchanging. Notting Hill has traditionally been an area of cheap, bedsit housing. As such, it naturally became the focus for immigrants arriving in Britain. The post-WWII reconstruction led to a labour shortage and immigration was positively encouraged. In 1948, the ship Empire Windrush brought the first wave of immigrants from the depressed West Indies to Britain, a country which then had full employment. But the recessionof the late fifties caused unemployment to rise, and a familiar pattern of scapegoating began. There were no anti-discrimination laws and 'no blacks' signs were still perfectly legal, and socially acceptable. A postwar housing shortage encouraged immigrants to migrate to the cheap, inner city areas, where unscrupulous landlords, willing to rent to blacks, could charge what they liked. The term Rachmanism, after Peter Rachman, the most notorious of slum landlords, came into common usage and tenants' rights were improved. On paper, at least. Late summer 1958 saw race riots between blacks and Teddy Boys (the bequiffed rockers of the period) in the streets od Notting Hill. You can see a fanciful version of this period in Julian Temple's flashy musicalisation of Absolute Beginners. Better still, read Coln MacInnes' original novel at amazon.com or amazon.co.uk. You can see a more realistic version of Notting Hill in Michael Winner's West 11 (the area's postcode), made back in 1963, when the director still seemed to give a damn, or in Bryan Forbes's 1962 The L-Shaped Room, with Leslie Caron as the French girl in London to get an abortion. The boarding house is a daring compendium of sixties issues: race! prostitution! lesbianism! The locations for both the films remain, a little gentrified maybe, but essentially unchanged. A mere five years after the tentative, black-and-white, documentary-style West 11, Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell filmed Performance in the same area (you can see Turner Purple's (Mick Jagger) famously decrepit pad in the opening credits of West 11. But how much the world hade changed. We'd had the first wave of Britpop with the Beatles and the Stones, '67's Summer of Love, hippies and drugs. Lots of drugs. Warners' kept Performance sitting on the shelf for two years, and it's nao hard to imagine them sitting frozen at the first showing like the audience for Springtime for Hitler. The 'blue door' factor, probably did no more than speed up a process already happening. many businesses closed down. West Eleven was the title of a film about bedsit living, it's now a desirable postcode. Portobello Road recreated for Bedknobs and Broomsticks. In the top ten of London's tourist attractions. Fruit and veg on weekdays, second-hand on Friday and the famous antiques market on packed Saturdays. Begun in the 1860s, and always been busy.
Portobello Road became the trendy location in the mid sixties with the advent of Victorian 'camp', when no pad was complete without a single peacock feather and a large elaborate initial letter. See Michael caine's bachelor pad in The Italian Job (on Denbigh Mews at the south end of Portobello, next to Alice's in the middle of the antique market). •
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