Any hot water needed was heated in a kettle. There was no running hot water, inside toilet or bath, apart from the tin bath we used once a week in the large kitchen/dining room. In the early 1970s the house was taken over by the North Kensington Amenity Trust and became the Notting Hill Carnival office before its eventual demolition.Īnne Bedford (now McSweeney) has fond memories of living there, although she recalls: ‘I now know that the conditions were far from ideal but then I knew no different. When the Westway construction work began the Bedfords sold up and moved to south London. The Bedford family at 3 Acklam Road (1860 - 1965)įrom the 19th century up until 1965, number 3 Acklam Road, near the Portobello Road junction, was occupied by the Bedford family. We now have 460 completed street histories and 47040 partial historiesįind streets or residential blocks within the M25 by clicking STREETS Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike LicenceĬlick here to go to a random London street Since it was first developed in the 1830s, Notting Hill has had an association with artists and ’alternative’ culture. Notting Hill was slowly gentrified from the 1980s onwards now has a contemporary reputation as an affluent and fashionable area known for attractive terraces of large Victorian townhouses, and high-end shopping and restaurants (particularly around Westbourne Grove and Clarendon Cross).Ī Daily Telegraph article in 2004 used the phrase the ’Notting Hill Set’ to refer to a group of emerging Conservative politicians, such as David Cameron and George Osborne, who were once based in Notting Hill. Caribbean immigrants were drawn to the area in the 1950s, partly because of the cheap rents, but were exploited by slum landlords like Peter Rachman, and also became the target of white racist Teddy Boys in the 1958 Notting Hill race riots. As middle class households ceased to employ servants, the large Notting Hill houses lost their market and were increasingly split into multiple occupation.įor much of the 20th century the large houses were subdivided into multi-occupancy rentals. The reputation of the district altered over the course of the 20th century.
The local telephone prefix 7727 (originally 727) is based on the old telephone exchange name of PARk. The original idea was to call the district Kensington Park, and other roads (notably Kensington Park Road and Kensington Park Gardens) are reminders of this. Many of these streets bear the Ladbroke name, including Ladbroke Grove, the main north-south axis of the area, and Ladbroke Square, the largest private garden square in London. Working with the architect and surveyor Thomas Allason, Ladbroke began to lay out streets and houses, with a view to turning the area into a fashionable suburb of the capital (although the development did not get seriously under way until the 1840s).
The main landowner in Notting Hill was the Ladbroke family, and from the 1820s James Weller Ladbroke began to undertake the development of the Ladbroke Estate. The area remained rural until the westward expansion of London reached Bayswater in the early 19th century. There was a farm called variously "Knotting-Bernes,", "Knutting-Barnes" or "Nutting-barns" and this name was transferred to the hill above it.
The word Notting might originate from a Saxon called Cnotta with the =ing part indicating "the place inhibited by the people of" - i.e. Notting Hill is a cosmopolitan district known as the location for the annual Notting Hill Carnival, and for being home to the Portobello Road Market.