How the rich destroyed Notting Hill Twenty five years after the film, it has been hollowed out

I have a Notting Hill story: a housing story. I lived in a walk-up studio on Palace Court at the turn of the millennium and, when I was late with my rent, my landlord sexually assaulted me, and I said nothing, but I paid the following month on time. I wonder if that is a typical Notting Hill story, so common I almost forgot it myself. But Notting Hill is two cities with two kinds of stories, the dreamlike and the deadly. One Notting Hill contains residents who paid more capital gains tax than three major British cities in 2020; in the other, looms Grenfell Tower, swaddled in rippling tarpaulin. These two depend on each other, because you only need a dreamworld if reality is unjust. Nowhere else in London is so polarised, or practices self-worship like this. The most famous Notting Hill story is the one by Richard Curtis, which turns 25 today. Curtis is an affable man who can’t look at the world without trying to turn it into something it isn’t: an entirely benevolent place. He has lived in Notting Hill, and he made it an object, like a man writing a love letter to his sofa. His Notting Hill is a retelling of Cinderella with William Thacker (Hugh Grant) as the maidservant and Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) as the prince — now a film star; what’s the difference? They are both thwarted artists (he can’t sell books; her films are terrible) and neither seems to know if they are humble or grandiose or if they want to live in fiction or reality. Notting Hill feels the same way —more wax-work garden than place — and is the ideal setting for this self-pitying, consumer capitalist love affair, which reaches a climax when Anna gives Thacker a Chagall. Here, on a Saturday morning, the market is swagged for its six million annual visitors. It is a crush, which happens when you hollow out London, put all the wisteria in one place, and write a vapid, world-famous fairy tale about it. [su_pullquote]"Notting Hill is where the architects of Austerity lived: it is also the site of its calamity."[/su_pullquote] I am posing as a vapid fan on a Notting Hill film tour. Because my fellow fans are foreign tourists — Gucci-heavy Italians, exhausted Israelis, and an ethics professor from Michigan — their first question to the young guide is: do you live here? I repress a snort as she says that she lives in the western suburbs of London, because I knew that. The idea that Notting Hill is an authentic London is powerful: because cinema says so, we believe that ordinary children walk these streets, though they don’t. The Phoenix Cinema, which appeared in Notting Hill is now an art gallery filled with Victoriana: that is, it has stopped screening a fake London, and has become the set of one instead. This is a film-maker’s ideal: a brightened Victorian slum filled with happy Victorian children, a Dickensian stage without Dickensian ideas. It’s true that Portobello Road — named for a battle in Panama — was once like this. Notting Hill’s gentrification is tidal: the rich come in, leave, and return, and the poor take up whatever space is left to serve them. But we are at the top of the curve: a terraced house on Chepstow Villas is £15 million now, and the only working-class people who own houses in Notting Hill have lived here since the Sixties. I meet a greengrocer with a flat in Blenheim Crescent. Her father was in Notting Hill, she says, in a yellow shirt, and when she misses him, she watches it. Notting Hill was more fun in the Sixties, she adds, when everyone was on LSD, and I don’t doubt it: actresses manned stalls when they were resting. The market traders are fearful that the market will be shrunk, to make it more like Soho. The market and the carnival are always under threat, being remnants of working-class culture but the traders have bought into the dream world too. One tells me: “It [the market] creeps under your skin, and you come to love this untidy little creature, it becomes part of you.” He sounds like Bert in Mary Poppins, or Richard Curtis himself, if he had given a working-class Londoner a leading role in Notting Hill, which of course he didn’t. It famously had no black characters, though this was a Caribbean district, and you can see the remnants to the north: Jay Dees Catering and Caribbean Take-Away and People’s Sound. Curtis held a looking glass up and saw only himself. Probably unconsciously, our guide tells us a joke. She pauses by Banksy’s "Made You Look" (2006, it’s the title in scrabble tiles) on the wall of an ugly modernist house. She says the owner interrupted the graffiti artist and was told that if he went back to sleep, he would wake up to a more valuable house. This is Banksy the anti-war anti-Capitalist as Rumpelstiltskin, weaving straw into gold for the already rich. George Orwell’s house is opposite, and I wonder what he would say to Banksy’s intervention. But capitalist activism is popular here: Conscience Kitchen, for instance, on All Saints’ Road. [su_unherd_related fttitle="Suggested reading" author="Tanya Gold"]https://staging.unherd.com/2024/02/the-betrayal-of-benefits-street/[/su_unherd_related] Thacker’s Travel Bookshop was inspired by the Notting Hill Bookshop in Blenheim Crescent. Tourists mass round it, taking photographs of themselves. “Notting Hill feels like a film set,” a local woman tells me, “because so many people are taking photographs all the time.” “It’s like a cult,” says another. The shop is packed but almost no one is buying a book. Perhaps they don’t need one since, being in fiction. Instead, they buy canvas bags that say Notting Hill to prove they came here and write love letters, which are posted on the cork board: “Dear reader it was like a dream to enter the store after watching the movie.” We visit the blue door of Thacker’s home. It isn’t the real door: that was auctioned for charity. You can’t buy a home here, but you can buy an idea. Notting Hill, one tells me, “is huge in China”. Biscuiteers “Biscuit Boutique and Icing Café” has an entire biscuit London in the window, because the more uninhabitable London becomes for the average person the more it is finessed into an aesthetic or, here, biscuit. A ginger-bread resident is £7.95, and you can buy a biscuit pencil to write a biscuit novel. At the end of Portobello Road is the pub where the murder in Martin Amis's London Fields was planned: in the novel, the Black Cross; in life, the Golden Cross. It is now, inevitably, a sushi bar, but it is still sticky with alcoholism, which is oblivious to newer dream worlds, having one of its own already, and it is my favourite place on Portobello Road. “Being a resident from a working-class background we say Ladbroke Grove,” a man tells me, pointedly. (Like all dream worlds, the boundaries of Notting Hill are vague and sinuous). He says calling it Notting Hill, “does bother me. Because of everything that comes with Notting Hill. The working class will be moved out, and the history will be rewritten in a heartbeat. I don’t think tourists truly grasp that.” The charmed rich tend to destroy what they think they love: they can’t help it. John from Portobello Camera under the Westway says: “So-called people,” — he means the charmed rich — “don’t want nothing to do with the carnival. The very thing they love about the area they don’t want to participate in. They board up their property, lock it down, and fly away. They want to pick their social menu.” [su_unherd_related fttitle="Suggested reading" author="Tanya Gold"]https://staging.unherd.com/2023/01/what-if-king-charles-were-your-landlord/[/su_unherd_related] I head north to the Grenfell Tower and the memorial to the 72 dead. It isn't much. The memorial is a board by a school, shockingly close to the ruin itself, and a mirror to the corkboard in the Notting Hill Bookshop. “Five years, no justice,” it says. [It’s seven years now]. “We will never forget all these lives lost for what? £££! Your lives ALL matter no matter what age, colour, or creed. JUSTICE FOR GRENFELL.” “Fuck the Tories”. “Poor quality housing kills too”. “You all deserved so much better”. “Missing you is a never—ending sorrow”. Notting Hill is where the architects of Austerity lived: it is also the site of its calamity. "Could Grenfell have happened elsewhere?” a man asks me. He answers his own question. “In other parts of Kensington and Chelsea, definitely not.” This part of Notting Hill ripples with fury: there are makeshift memorials in scrubby gardens, and on walls. I find a list of 18 children who died in the fire, one still born. Even so — or, rather, for this reason — dream Notting Hill is winning, being pretty, better funded, and a movie star.

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