If
one thing makes Notting Hill
unique, it's that it's one of the few London neighbourhoods
to remain almost totally unchanged for years. 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 hopefuls from the depressed West Indies
to Britain, a country which then had full employment. But
the late fifties brought a recession, unemployment began to
rise, and a familiar pattern of scapegoating began.
In
the fifties, 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 West Indians, 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 eventually 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, available at amazon.com
or amazon.co.uk.
There's a more realistic version of Notting
Hill on view 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
hippie retreat of Turner Purple (Mick Jagger): Performance
|
After the release of Notting
Hill in 1999, the notorious 'blue door' factor, probably
did no more than speed up a process already happening. many
businesses closed down. West 11
was the title of a film about desperate bedsit living, it's
now a highly desirable postcode.
Notting Hill's Portobello
Road was recreated in the studio for Bedknobs
and Broomsticks. The street market is in the top
ten of London's tourist attractions, a fact you'll appreciate
if you visit at the weekend. But that really is the time to
see it. On weekdays, locals buy fruit and veg here. Second-hand
goods are included on on Friday but on Saturdays the road
is packed for the famous antiques market. Begun in the 1860s,
it's always been busy.
Portobello Road became the trendiest of locations 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 rescued from an about-to-be-demolished shopfront.
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).
More to come
Films shot
in Notting Hill »
London areas »
back to Travel page »
|
