Three years after the Grenfell Tower tragedy, Chris Sullivan excavates the hidden history of one of London’s most polarised neighbourhoods
When ‘gentrification’ or ‘social cleansing’ is mentioned, one could immediately think of London’s Notting Hill — an area with a long history of rapacious landlords, avaricious developers and obscene displays of both privilege and penury.
Nothing illustrated this more than when Grenfell Tower went up in flames killing 72 people on 14 June 2017.
Sitting in the middle of an area with some of the highest property prices in Britain, Grenfell Tower was an indelible blot on the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s Conservative Council and its vision for the area. It had tried to rehouse its working-class and ethnic minority residents for years with tempting offers of flats outside London in places such as Reading. It had ignored the residents’ complaints about the lack of fire extinguishers, sprinklers as well as faulty lifts and lack of accessible exits. In response, the Grenfell Action Group was formed. In 2013, the council threatened legal action, saying that the group’s online posts demanding action amounted to defamation and harassment.
In January 2016, the group warned that, in the event of a fire in the tower block, they would “do everything in our power to ensure that those in authority know how long and how appallingly our landlord has ignored their responsibility to ensure the heath and safety of their tenants and leaseholders”.
Following the disaster, Channel 4 News’ Jon Snow asked the area’s Conservative Council Leader Nicholas Paget-Brown: “Now that the tower has gone, will you be building housing for rich people?’” Paget-Brown resigned a month later.
Notting Dale
The neighbourhood has always been the subject of huge controversy. In the 19th Century, the area including Grenfell was labelled the ‘West End Avernus’, which, in Virgil’s Aeneid, is the name of the entrance to the underworld and its inferno full of charred cadavers.
Once known as the ‘Potteries and Piggeries’ or Notting Dale, this area was described by Charles Dickens in 1850 as “a plague spot scarcely equalled for its insalubrity by any other in London”. It had a high death and infant mortality rate. Due to social cleansing, many poor people were moved to the area. Tough street-fighting brick makers worked huge kilns, next to pig keepers. There were also pariahs, gamblers, prostitutes scoundrels and staves who availed themselves of cock, dog and bare knuckle prize fights.
At the centre was Pottery Lane, which soon became known as ‘Cut-Throat Lane’ as gangs robbed any stranger of everything they owned. Few Londoners dared to set foot in here, with its sweet and sour stench from the massive empty clay pits filled with foul-smelling water laced with pig and human waste detritus.
In 1837, entrepreneur John Whyte made the mistake of building The Kensington Hippodrome racecourse around Notting Dale, in a bid to rival Ascot. Naturally, local rookery-dwellers went about their trademark skulduggery cackling with glee as hundreds of wallets bulging with cash appeared with rich punters. There were only ever 13 race meetings and the track closed in 1842. Crescents with grand five-storey stuccoed townhouses were built on the circular racetrack.
Slums and Grand Townhouses
While the rest of London grumbled about the state of Notting Dale, Notting Hill proper (Notting derived from the Anglo Saxon first name Cnotta while the ‘ing’ denotes a Saxon settlement) became an unswerving example of class privilege and elitism. Architect Thomas Allason created grand townhouses with private communal gardens at back looking like an extension of Kensington.
These new townhouses attracted wannabe middle classes who, like today’s Conservative voters, dreamed of joining la beau monde but couldn’t afford it. It wasn’t a great place for the arts. Although Thomas Hardy lived on Portobello Road, Notting Hill was just too consciously bourgeois and Notting Dale just too darned rough, even for the hardiest artist.
Portobello Road, originally a farm on Golborne Road named in 1740 after a Panamanian town, sprang up as food market for the well to-do. Rag and bone men moved in from Notting Dale selling their wares, as still happens on Fridays in Golborne Road, while at the Notting Hill end they called themselves ‘antique traders’.
By the time of the 1929 Census, Notting Dale and, even Portland Road, were described in as ‘degraded and semi-criminal’. Consequently, the rancid dwellings were demolished to be replaced by the area’s first social housing, Notting Wood House on Clarendon Road and Winterbourne House on Portland Road.
