What Notting Hill reveals about the architecture of inequality

Notting Hill has long been a byword for gentrification. After its nadir in the 1950s and 1960s, with race riots and unscrupulous landlords, the west London district rose at dizzying speed. A kind of finishing school for the wealthier classes seeking boho credentials, its residents graduated to become the kings and queens of the London media scene, financiers, fashion designers, plus a British prime minister and chancellor. One resident even made a film about the area.

Last week it was reported that one enclave of Notting Hill, the Norland ward, with around 6,000 residents, had more capital gains to declare between 2015 and 2019 than the cities of Newcastle, Liverpool and Manchester combined. Capital gains tax is paid on the rise in value of assets, outside basic allowances — a second home, the sale of a business and most shares. 

It makes a perfect headline. Embedded in it is all the cynicism about one clan — the upper-middle class, playing at boho — with the power to transform an impoverished district into a minted one in a matter of decades. Was it good luck or family connections? Was it the eviction of the sitting population by the force of economics? 

It is very easy to sneer at gentrifiers but there are two problems with it. First, London has become richer, and people with money also need somewhere to live. Second, Notting Hill was historically well-to-do. This has been more of a regentrification.

Notting Hill is particular to its times — the middle and upper-middle classes drawn as much to the melting pot as their own well-to-do heritage

The capital gains map, from research by the LSE and Warwick University, looks surprisingly similar to The Descriptive Map of London Poverty, drawn up by the Victorian social reformer Charles Booth. In his 1889 map, streets are coloured according to wealth — marked in gold — and poverty in blues and black, for “vicious, semi-criminal”.

The streets of tall Victorian terraces in Notting Hill are largely a deep red: well-to-do. The Norland ward, crescents of stuccoed villas and communal gardens, are the golden crown on the west side of London. 

Unlike traditional working-class areas turned well-to-do, such as Stoke Newington in north-east London, Notting Hill’s wealthy were reclaiming historic territory. Houses had been designed for those rich enough to have servants. The second world war ended that culture, London decanted to the suburbs and the area became home to a Windrush generation desperate for housing. 

When rent controls ended in 1957, landlords spotted a money spinner, subdividing large buildings into smaller flats. One such landlord, Peter Rachman, became notorious in Notting Hill, letting property for extortionate rents and allowing them to drift into neglect. Race riots broke out and the far-right Oswald Mosley stood to be the local MP. Then they came up against the aspirations and buying power of the Richard Curtis generation.

From the 1980s, younger folk who didn’t want to live in the suburbs found houses with grand proportions close to central London. Families who could no longer afford Chelsea started doing up dilapidated Notting Hill houses until they regained their value — and, judging by today’s price tags, wildly surpassed it.

Ownership brought expectation of a certain style of living: if you’ve come from the wealthier classes, you half expect to live like your parents did. The architecture was there — stucco-fronted houses with large rooms for entertaining were evidence in the 19th century that you’d made it — and then so was the mindset. Block by block, the place was retaken.

David Cameron and his chancellor George Osborne were both in the Notting Hill set. Alan Johnson, Osborne’s opposite for Labour, grew up in the area, though on the wrong side of the tracks, in the 1950s. He described walking up Portobello Road — nicknamed “The Lane” — in his memoir: “[It] was a stroll through the English class system even then as one progressed towards Holland Park. Notting Hill didn’t become gentrified — it always was.”

Contrast the Norland ward with Notting Dale, directly to its west. It is one of the starkest slides into poverty on Booth’s map of London. The terraces of houses were rebuilt as respectable council estates in the 1950s onwards. The Grenfell Tower block was built in the early 1970s.

Despite neighbouring each other, and the wealthier classes taking over boundary streets with historic architecture such as Clarendon Cross, there remains a stark division between the two. A three-bedroom flat in an ex-council estate in Notting Dale now costs £650,000. Up in the crescents, a few hundred metres away, they go for three times the price.

For whatever the desire to live close to the centre, in a happening place, the aspiration stops when the architecture becomes utilitarian. You aren’t restoring your own class’s grand heritage, perhaps?

Fortunes rise and fall, as do buildings, clans and interest rates. Every district has a different story to tell. Notting Hill is particular to its times — the middle and upper-middle classes drawn as much to the melting pot as their own well-to-do heritage. The Curtis generation has reached retirement age. It’s cashing out. Sneer if you will but haven’t they done well?

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