New landscape: under the Westway

I was bound to write about the Westway sooner or later. There is a complex story to be told about the historical, political, economic and sociological impact of its construction. But I don’t know if I’ll ever try to write that story. When I began looking at images of the Westway (and there are have plenty of them to choose from – the novelty of the structure drew amateur and professional photographers) it was the effect on the landscape, psychological or geographical, of a mass of concrete in the air above the streets that struck me first.  A picture like the one above is an almost abstract display of shapes and curves. Only the truncated row of houses at the bottom hints at the social and physical upheaval of demolished homes and divided communities that was one of the immediate effects of the new motorway.

Here a concrete curve hovers above the rubble and earth like an airship. You can barely decode the shapes in the background (prefabs on the right, a foot bridge on the left?).

The spaces below the road look subdued, almost empty.

Just a hint of graffiti, and is that a solitary figure?

Above the parapet, the road itself still looks under populated.

The landscape below it is getting ready for activity.

Earth moving vehicles are beginning the process of landscaping.

A canopy is erected.

People start to come and go past the empty spaces.

Traffic goes by above, moderately at first. Do buses ever go that way now? The one in the picture is not in service, on its way back to the garage probably.

Suddenly the new zone is full of movement.

Sporting activity begins as anticipated by the planners.

A contact sheet marked up for cropping but I prefer the whole image which shows the underside of the road. Here is another shot from a contact sheet:

Some activity was casual.Any open patch of land would do.

Some was exuberant.

And some, in the margins of the new zone was half hidden.

Postscript

Some of these pictures come from the archive of the now sadly defunct community history group HistoryTalk. Thanks to them for all their good work over the years.

This is the third of my transport themed posts which are part of our contribution to the Cityread campaign. I hope I haven’t stretched the theme too much. I don’t know what I’m doing next week by the way.

 

Searching for the Ford Capri

We’re going on another tour through the photo survey this week but not down a single street. The photo survey pictures were taken by John Rogers between 1969 and 1975, mostly in 1970 and 1971. That’s a few years before my brief time working in the motor trade. I worked cleaning new cars for a garage that had a British Leyland franchise. Some of you who remember the 1970s may remember how awful British Leyland cars were then – the Allegro, the Marina and above all the Princess a car so awful it has been almost obliterated by history. Occasionally my sales manager Bob would acquire a Ford for one of his special customers and we would both welcome these examples of decent automotive technology with some relief. There were Escorts and the new mark 4 Cortina but our favourites were the Granada and the Capri, both genuine classics hallowed by their appearances on TV in the Sweeney and the Professionals. I stand very little chance of finding a Granada in the photo survey pictures (they first came out in 1972) but I might just find a Capri.

So where do you look for a car?

A garage is one place to start. This is one of those garages a few of you may remember where they stack the cars neatly but you don’t have instant access. Most of these cars looked pretty old even in 1970. In terms of design it was a transitional period (but aren’t they all?) between the staid fifties cars like that Rover you can see, the watered down versions of American designs and the hatched-backed days to come.

That’s a Ford Corsair on the left, with its odd pointed nose. Before we leave can I just invite any car enthusiasts to identify any of the cars in these pictures? There was a time when I could have done that but it was thirty odd years ago. I’m not really a car person. I don’t even drive. I just found myself around car people and got interested. Let’s get outside. See where we were?

Here’s another Ford:

But it’s only a lowly Anglia already fairly low on the meter of desirability even by 1970. What’s the one behind it? Addison Avenue must have been a quiet street. Just off it was Addison Place, a strange little converted mews kind of a street overlooked by Campden Hill Towers.

And that car in the foreground would I think be a Ford Consul, the fifties styled precursor of the Granada.

Not all of the British Leyland marques were hideous. That’s a Triumph Spitfire , a traditional British sports car. Other mews streets were full of cars.

Amid the old style cars in this back street of garages an expensive looking sports car, probably Italian. The odd thing I sometimes think is that expensive sports cars still look like that decades later as if that low wide look is the optimum shape.

The mews streets used to be filled with small garages servicing cars. Note the sign: Barclaycard Welcome – something of a novelty then.

A 60s novelty the Mini Moke parked in Linden Gardens. In the same street the opposite of a Mini Moke:

It’s also a Ford, a 60s American model, but I can’t make out the word on the side. I’m sure someone can help me out with that. Below a home grown model:

The Mark 3 Cortina parked in Christchurch Street. A bit of a classic itself. Nearby another puzzle for you:

I should know what this is, it looks so familiar. Someone tell me (No, not the mini.)

The first sighting of our quarry is back at the other end of the Borough in Clarendon Road.

The slightly cluttered styling of the Mark 1 Capri. And having found that one I came across another down in Earls Court.

Is that guy in the window coming back to close the boot?

In the very same street a Mark 2, at last an example of the car that sat in my cleaning bay in Poland Street.

There it is by the fence. For me the Mark 2 Capri represents the mid seventies like no other car, better than the high performance cars of the era. Seeing it in this picture reminds me of a time when the traffic was lighter, the cars were serviced in back streets and the Ford Capri was exciting and glamorous, if you can imagine such a time.

Postscript

As I said above if you can identify any of the other vehicles in these pictures or you have to correct any inadvertent errors of mine, please leave a comment.

Return of the secret life of postcards

The unknown photographers who took this week’s pictures were working in the street like Ernest Milner who took the pictures in our Empty Street series. They were unlike Milner in two respects. They were working for themselves speculatively, taking photographs hoping to sell them later. And crucially they were working mostly during the daytime hours when the streets were no longer empty.

This view is of Notting Hill Gate looking west. Postcard images vary enormously in quality. The best ones give you the opportunity to zoom in on the action and catch a flavour of the individual lives of the people in them.

On the northern side of the street a man uses a hooked pole to pull out a shop awning. He keeps an eye on the approaching woman who won’t thank him if any water drips on her from the canvas. There are horse drawn carriages and in the distance a motor bus.

On the southern side of the street:

Henry Hobson Finch’s Hoop Tavern, William J Tame, fruiterer – his staff are loading a delivery wagon- and Matthew Pittman, stationer. This is the corner of Silver Street (then the name for the northern section of Kensington Church Street) about 1904. There’s a rather dejected looking girl standing next to the delivery wagon and in the foreground a woman with a pram.

She’s looking at the display to her right; her arms are straight, pushing the front wheels of the pram off the ground possibly getting ready for moving it off the pavement. The sleeves of her dress are tight to the elbows and then much bigger – the so-called “leg of mutton” look, reaching its apogee in the early 1900s. We can almost see what will happen next as her routine day continues.

The postcard is a picture of the street as a whole. Perhaps we were never intended to look this close. But as I’m sure you know by now I can never resist the details which are often found at the edge of the picture. That’s where the secret lives are found.

Still in Notting Hill, just a little further west:

This picture shows the Central Line station which was on the other side of the road from the Metropolitan Line. The street on the right is Pembridge Gardens. On the left you can see the buildings on the west side of Pembridge Road – the angle is deceptive and made me puzzle over the maps for a while. Let’s go back to the first postcard.

There you can see the station, the same buildings on Pembridge Road, and the motor bus. My transport correspondent tells me that the starter arm is visible underneath the radiator and that the engine block is quite low slung which indicates that this is an early model – later models were higher off the ground to protect the undercarriage and give the driver a better view. Horlicks Malted Milk was not imported into the UK until 1890. Horse-drawn and motor buses co-existed for some years before the horse drawn versions were superseded in the early 1900s.

Look at the horse bus again:

There are people waiting but the bus looks pretty full. That woman striding away from it has the air of a passenger who has just alighted and wants to get moving under her own steam again.

In contrast to the busy high street along the road in Holland Park Avenue things were quieter.

During the day the quieter residential areas would be mostly given over to women and children with a few street workers and delivery boys.

At the portmanteau and umbrella warehouse some window shopping is going on. This picture is not as sharp as some so it’s difficult to be sure if the two women standing together are wearing some kind of uniform.

Something about the hats, I think with a piece of material draped down on one side.

Here’s another quiet street a little further south:

Nothing much is happening but some of the locals are paying attention.

The two women ignore the photographer and go on their way but the children and the man on the delivery tricycle are taking a keen interest.

A little further west the stillness is almost palpable in this view of Gilston Road.

The church in the background is St Mary the Boltons. Instead of terraces of houses there are what one architectural guide has called “crude Italianate villas”. A little sharp if you ask me. I would call them grand suburban villas and the two women who have paused for the photographers are respectable middle class ladies

It’s a quiet dusty summer’s day in the new suburbs.

But it wasn’t all quiet at this end of the old Borough (or Vestry, depending on the date ) of Kensington.

I’ve always found this particular picture of the Old Brompton Road looking towards South Kensington Station quite intriguing, mostly because of what’s happening on the right of the picture.

What does the expression on that boy’s face mean? Or is he just dazzled by the flash? Or is it just one of those odd in between two states expressions which the camera sometimes captures? Something about the body language of the girl tells me that she’s playing some part in this. Has she just said something sharp to the boy? Are they related? Or is she just posing for the camera? There’s just not enough information here. I can’t help thinking that if we just knew a little more there would be a story.

Below Fulham Road, at the junction with Drayton Gardens. Fifty years or so before this scene would be fields, market gardens and cottages in the hinterland between Kensington and Chelsea.

But now this is another busy street.

A belligerent looking shopkeeper, three men just hanging around on a street corner, and that man in the centre, looking to see what’s coming before stepping off the pavement. He looks like a man with places to go and people to see, not a man you want to trifle with. And of course unlike the women in these images if he was to stride out of the picture onto today’s Fulham Road we might not give him a second glance.

We’ve moved quite a short distance from one part of Kensington to the edge. Let’s go back for one more picture. This is a slightly unpromising view of Pembridge Gardens, a little discoloured with age and not particularly sharp.

But on the left you can see a woman and her maid.

It’s unusual to see a household servant on the street. Perhaps the delivery man has something which the lady didn’t want to carry in herself. Make your own story out of this one. Sometimes the past is just too out of focus for us to tell exactly what is happening.

A long walk down Walmer Road 1969-1971 part two

I left you last week at Dulford Street facing south.

Those two women are staring at you so we’d better move on. This section of Walmer Road is where there had been most changes since the 1930s. Here is Barlow House under construction (see how the crane is running on rails?):

The Beehive pub is visible in this picture but look opposite Barlow House at the row of terraced houses and the low industrial building.  The street between them is Bomore Road, which was actually moved southwards when Kensington Sports Centre was built. (Forgive me if I find that fascinating – it took me several minutes staring at two nearly identical 1960s OS maps to realise what had been done.) I once met someone who was in one of our photos of Bomore Road. It’s a good story but I can’t show you the picture.

This view is from 1937:

This shows the Walmer Road entrance to the Notting Hill brewery. When that was demolished a new housing block was built, Nottingwood House. You can see pictures of the demolition in the Ruins and reconstruction in North Kensington post (link opposite).

Further south more industrial buildings were replaced.

The Rugby Club was a long standing sporting and social club for young people first established in an old bus yard as a boys’ club in 1889 by a former pupil of Rugby School. This building dates from the early 1960s. (Who was Jim Shay- a name significant enough to be repeated by the writer but now forgotten?).

Some original buildings survived. Below you can see number 239 one of two surviving artisan’s cottages showing some signs of early gentrification.

Shutters, a recent paint job and a Renault 4 parked outside. These two houses have survived and now look even more prosperous.

On the west side of the road there was a Council depot:

See the pile of rubbish bags on the left. Was there a strike on at the time?

Also on the west side a building called the Cottage which I wouldn’t have included as it’s still there today but is that a Ford Galaxie parked outside incongruously juxtaposed with a Morris Traveller?

The final stretch of Walmer Road had a long narrow school building, St John’s disused in 1971.

Two men are doing something with a long pole or plank but I couldn’t say what exactly.

They didn’t choose to go through the open gate where several other planks are stacked.

On the west side of the road was the main feature of this end of Walmer Road, Avondale Park.

This view northwards shows the disused kiln the only thing from this section of the east side of the road which survives to this day.

At this time Avondale Park was a classic municipal park as laid out in their hundreds in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The Lodge seen below has the faintly rural look of park buildings with a hint of Arts and Crafts about it.

In 1971 when John Rogers took these pictures it had been more or less forgotten that beneath the park was a small network of tunnels built in 1939 as air raid shelters. They were revealed a couple of years ago during landscaping work and I got a chance to go into them before they were sealed again. I wrote about them in one of my first blog posts, Secrets of Avondale Park (see drop down menu Complete list of posts) but here is one of my low resolution photos:

Back in February 1971 this woman, struggling with her inquisitive dog had no idea what lay below:

Avondale Park marks the southern end of Walmer Road. In 1971 there was a junction with Princedale Road, Kenley Street, Hippodrome Place and Pottery Lane.  All street names which sound picturesque and rural rather than sinister as the narrator of Absolute Beginners described the street names at the Latimer Road end. He could see the difference:

On the south side of this area, down by the W11, things are a little different, but in a way that somehow makes them worse, and that is. Owing to a freak of fortune, and some smart work by the estate agents too, I shouldn’t be surprised, there are one or two sections that are positively posh: not fashionable, mind you, but quite graded, with their big back gardens and that absolute silence, which in London is the top sign of a respectable location. You walk about in these bits, adjusting your tie and looking down to see if your shoes are shining, when – wham! Suddenly you’re back in the slum area again – honest, it’s really startling, like where the river joins on to the shore, too quite different creations of dame nature, cheek by thing

Princedale Road in 1971 was already looking upwardly mobile:

The houses and shops look well kept, the cars cleaner.

Is that a Bristol on the right? Remember their only showroom is a short drive away in Kensington High Street. The demonstrator cars there had the cherished number plates 100 MPH and MPH 100.  But don’t let me get bogged down in motoring trivia. What are those two guys doing in the camper van? That’s probably another story.

A long walk down Walmer Road 1969-1971 Part 1

When I did the post on Hurstway Street a few weeks back regular reader Chris Pain drew my attention to a passage from Absolute Beginners (1959), the second book in the London trilogy by Colin MacInnes:

On the east side, still in the W10 bit, there’s another railway, and a park with a name only Satan in all his splendour could have thought up, namely Wormwood Scrubs, which has a prison near it, and another hospital, and a sports arena, and the new telly barracks of the BBC, and with a long, lean road called Latimer road which I particularly want you to remember, because out of this road, like horrible tits dangling from a lean old sow, there hang a whole festoon of what I think must really be the sinisterest highways in our city, well, just listen to their names: Blechynden, Silchester, Walmer, Testerton and Bramley—can’t you just smell them, as you hurry to get through the cats-cradle of these blocks? In this part, the houses are old Victorian lower-middle tumble-down, built I dare say for grocers and bank clerks and horse-omnibus inspectors who’ve died and gone and their descendants evacuated to the outer suburbs, but these houses live on like shells, and there’s only one thing to do with them, absolutely one, which is to pull them down till not a one’s left standing up.

I think he was a bit harsh in his judgement although by 1969, the year John Rogers did our photo survey Hurstway, Testerton, Blechynden and Barandon Streets were looking quite run down. (Another correspondent told me that a film company painted some of the houses in the area black to make them look even worse for the filming of the early John Boorman film Leo the Last , released in 1970)

We may get to Silchester Road on another occasion but this week we’re going to start a long walk down the remaining street, Walmer Road. In its prime Walmer Road ran west from Latimer Road then curved south and ended at Princedale Road.

Here is number one Walmer Road:

The Latimer Arms, an impressive Victorian tavern. Next to it is number 1a:

By 1971 these two buildings were all that remained of the low numbers of Walmer Road. Here they are on an OS map:

It looks as though Walmer Road had fallen off the edge of the world, which is not far off the immediate effect of the construction of the Westway. It obliterated a whole section of Walmer Road and truncated Latimer Road. Walmer Road continued further on in the shadow of the new roundabout which included the spur road to Shepherd’s Bush.

Some side streets had gone altogether while the inhabitants of the others and the north side of Walmer Road had been cut off from the rest of the street.

This is a view looking east from Pember Street. A resident told me that as houses were demolished and the elevated road was constructed, apart from the expected problems of noise and dust, rats left the site in large numbers heading north towards the remaining houses. This is what the residents saw looking west:

In the other direction they could see see the rest of Walmer Road, now a long way off for them.

The street numbers began again at 117 and beyond the railway viaduct Walmer Road continued.

This is an earlier picture taken in July 1969, the same month John Rogers took the Hurstway Road pictures. Knowing that, I can feel something of the more relaxed atmosphere of the summer. Although beyond the bridge demolition and construction was already well under way the old community survives on this side. There’s another Ford Zephyr, and is that an estate version of the Citroen DS?

You can see the new road in the distance as well as more of the strange configuration of lights on the Citroen in this picture:

Here the rows of shops and small businesses begin.

England’s Dairy with milk crates and delivery bikes ready for the next morning.

Further along at 137, Orridge’s supplied food for pets and working animals.

You saw one of those working horses in the Hurstway Street post. I’ve been told that in the late afternoon the cart drivers and their animals would converge on Orridge’s and the boys working in the shop would have to load up the nose bags for the horses, quite hard work.

Walmer Road crossed Lancaster Road at this point and Clarendon Road split off on its own.

In this picture Clarendon Road is in the centre heading south and Walmer Road continues to the right between the building with the dark shop front ( a closed down TV rental place) and where the three women are standing in the road.

The man in the doorway in the picture below looks a bit suspicious but is probably innocently leaving the upstairs flat.

The picture below looks back up Walmer Road. You can see the Beehive pub and the Methodist Church on the corner of Lancaster Road.

Look at the open minivan.

In this picture taken seconds later the van is closed and its owner about to drive off. A man in an upstairs window continues their conversation till the last possible moment. Did you notice Nick’s Café earlier? Nick had also diversified into hairdressing just across the road it seems. I suppose it could be a completely separate Nick.

Walmer Road has now finished its curve and is now going south towards Notting Hill Gate. The terraced housing and shops give way to newer housing blocks such as this one:

Barlow House, part of a 1950s LCC development. This is where we draw breath for a week before attempting the final stretch which takes us into different territory and made Colin MacInnes’s protagonist change his tune.

I’ll almost certainly take you down Clarendon Road in the not too distant future.

Thanks to John Henwood for his reminiscences and a discussion about the tricky question of dating the demolitions in Walmer Road.

Details from OS maps copyright Ordnance Survey.

Summer in the city: the last days of Hurstway Street 1969

July 1969. A boy sits on the kerb playing, his father or brother nearby on the wall of the steps leading up to a house.  Take a look at the other houses and the general air of stillness in Hurstway Street. The streets were quieter in those days but this street is quiet because it’s awaiting demolition. If the house with the steps is where they live then they’re almost the last residents.

I picked Hurstway Street almost at random, looking through the Photo Survey pictures taken by the then library photographer John Rogers. It was this one which caught Imy eye first:

This shows the street from the other direction. It’s possible the boy and his father/brother are the figures visible in the distance but I was looking at the car. It’s a Ford Zephyr. A few years later in 1976 my friend Steve had one which he attempted to restore to working order. I think I sat in it, on one of the bench seats, in the cleaning bay at M——-  (P—- Street) Garage. On its maiden voyage the engine blew up and Steve was left on some road in north west London sitting with most of his worldly possessions in a vehicle which would never move under its own power again. So for me the car prefigures the fate of the street. And to make the point further look at the poorly parked vehicle in the distance on the right on the picture.

Some kind of Triumph? John was here that day to record the streets in the area in their last days but you can see why he took one of this wreck.

This is the location from a contemporary OS map:

Several of the streets in this space between Lancaster Road and the Metropolitan line were ready for demolition or slum clearance  as they used to call it. John walked several of them that day. Hurstway Street runs into Barandon Street.

Demolition has already begun. There is evidence of a much older way of life here too.

The street is quiet enough for the rag and bone man’s horse to take a break and have some refreshment. Do you see the advert for Tizer (the appetizer) that strange unnaturally coloured soft drink with a flavour I can barely recall now?

Beyond the blackened houses and boarded up shop fronts you can see the railway and the more recent housing blocks.

I imagine John turning from Barandon Street into Testerton Street.

There is another tiny group of people with business in the empty street. See the pile of tires and the house next to it with writing on the wall?

A strange and cryptic set of signs or slogans representing a final comment on the street?

As he inspected it John thought this van too had been abandoned.

Seeing the doors open he went into one of the houses and got this picture from a rear window:

Finally he completed the rectangle by entering Blechynden Street.

Blechynden Street looks slightly more active at first glance. But the houses are just as empty.

The only significant activity is taking place at the far end by the railway.

It looks as though a large number of tires are being loaded onto trucks and taken away. (Or it could be a delivery I suppose).

Here you can see a train passing overhead and through the tunnel a younger housing block on the way to Bramley Road. Another one of those cars with vestigial tail fins, which are the dull descendants of those baroque American cars of the 50s.

John’s walk round this rectangle of doomed streets is complete. I’m assuming that in the middle of July it would have been a sunny day, maybe even hot but you can’t see that in these pictures. Elsewhere in London people are sitting in the sun and having a good time, but here you can only see the grim business of a tiny part of the city being wound up and turned into a fading memory.

There are the boy and the man again, and a woman walking up the street. Perhaps they were just visitors like John taking a final look at Hurstway Street before it disappeared.  The names Testerton and Barandon were used again in new housing on Lancaster Road as was Hurstway – you can  find Hurstway Walk on modern maps but to the best of my knowledge the curious name Blechynden vanished with the street.

Map detail copyright Ordnance Survey.

All photos by John Rogers.

John Christie of Rillington Place

We have an author event at Kensington Central Library on November 8^th. Crime historian Jonathan Oates will be talking about his new book (published October 18^th) John Christie of Rillington Place: Biography of a serial killer. This is a definitive account of the Christie murders based on new research. I asked Jonathan to  write something about the case for the blog and he sent me this piece about some of the locations associated with the murders:

Most people have heard of John Christie of 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill and perhaps have seen the film, made in 1970 and starring Richard Attenborough as Christie and John Hurt as Timothy Evans. The actual street itself is long gone (renamed as Ruston Close in 1954 and demolished in the 1970s; number 10 in October 1970), but there are a number of buildings associated with the case which still stand, though are perhaps less well known and the following is a brief gazetteer.

[10 Rillngton Place: last house on the left]

Below is the Kensington Park Hotel, standing on the corner of Ladbroke Grove and Lancaster Road and the pub which Timothy Evans was fond of drinking in. Unlike many pubs it does not sell food, does not have ‘music’ and does not have a carpet; contrast this to a rather more upmarket and touristy pub on Praed Street near Paddington which was a haunt of Kathleen Maloney, Christie’s fourth victim. Middle class visitors to the KPH may well find themselves out of place.

The public library opposite the pub was the one visited by Ethel Christie on the evening of 8 November, the same day that fellow resident of number ten, Beryl Evans, was strangled. Christie himself had a library card so presumably also visited there. In Pentonville Prison it was said that he mainly read thrillers and that despite his airs, wasn’t much of a scholar, according to a fellow inmate.

The nearby Oxford Gardens is also of importance in the case. Firstly, because at number 41 there lived, for a few months of 1943, Ruth Fuerst, a young Austrian woman who became Christie’s first victim. Less well known is that Christie and his wife lived at number 23 in 1936, whilst Christie was employed as foreman at the Commodore Cinema in Hammersmith. This is the only house in London where Christie lived and which still stands. As with many houses in Notting Hill at this time, it was shared with other families.

Cambridge Gardens, number 108a was the home of the Thorley family from at least 1945-1947. Beryl Thorley, later Beryl Evans, lived there with her parents and brother, Basil. When her mother died, the family broke up, with her father going to Brighton, she marrying Timothy Evans in 1947 and her brother living elsewhere. Basil was convinced that his sister was murdered by her husband, who said to him, ‘I’m sorry, Baz’.

Number 319 Portobello Road was the address of second hand furniture dealer Robert Hookway who bought the furniture of both Timothy Evans and John Christie before the two left the district.  Dr Matthew Odess, Christie’s GP, resided at 30 Colville Square.

Many of the other buildings involved in the case are long gone. The Royalty Cinema, which employed Basil Thorley and which was patronised by the Evanses, has been demolished; it was on 105 Lancaster Road. Others include the house that the Evanses lived in, in St. Mark’s Road, number eleven and another house briefly resided in by the Christies in 1936; 172 Clarendon Road.

[The Royalty Cinema Lancaster Road as a bingo hall in 1972]

Returning to the subject of Rillington Place/Ruston Close, the most detailed source is www.10-rillington-place.co.uk

Postscript- DW

The Library photographer John Rogers visited Ruston Close on December 8^th in the last few days before the demolition was complete.

Number 10 had already gone. The rest of the street was about to follow it into oblivion.

Eventually there was new housing on the site. I took these pictures one evening on my way to an appointment in Lancaster Road, hence the poor light – I’ve attempted to adjust the brightness and contrast.

The new street, Bartle Road is not on the old footprint of Rillington Place as the map below shows – the Rillngton Place location was added by researcher Andy Eigendorf. The picture above shows a gap between houses looking through to the location of number 10 but the garden space itself is not on the site of the Christie house.

Careful planning has obliterated all trace of the tragic house. But the murders have not been forgotten.

Jonathan Oates will be joined by John Curnow of the 10 Rillington Place website and retired Metropolitan Police Superintendent Terry Johnson. This should be a fascinating event.

Details of the event on the What’s On page of the Council website:

http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/leisureandlibraries/libraries/libraryevents.aspx

Map detail copyright Ordnance Survey

Portobello Road in the 90s

Having done posts on Portobello Road in the 1950s and the 1970s I was keen to continue the story so I was pleased when we recently acquired a large number of photographs of streets in the borough which our Planning department no longer needed. The photographs were all taken in connection with planning applications, so they had no artistic or historical intent. And of course there was no intention to cover a whole street or district or capture an atmosphere. Their existence depends purely on someone’s desire to make changes in a building.

I looked through the three folders devoted to Portobello Road and picked out images I liked, not expecting to see any kind of story, thinking I would simply see shop fronts and stalls, some of them now gone, some of them still here. But what does emerge is a feeling for the decade, a decade which doesn’t seem to my recollection at least to have a distinctive identity.

Number 265 in 1990 and 299 in 1991, properties in need of improvement after the effects of the 1980s.

See the handwritten notice about DHSS estimates on this locked up property. But remember these are the properties someone wanted to improve not examples of how the street as a whole looked. At the same time the commercial life of the market continued and some businesses were looking prosperous.

Here, around number 345 on a quiet morning in 1991:

And here at 117 where you can see the entrance to Vernon Yard, a mews which was at one time the home of an early version of Virgin Records:

The collection has a few composite pictures made up of several individual photographs put together to form a larger image.

This one shows a whole row of shops at 139-151 continued below in a second version:

It’s an interesting technique which has probably now been replaced by digital methods of merging images. Here’s another example from 1995 of number 205:

Sometimes the applications included interiors and rear views, some of which can be interesting. This image of number 95 shows the street view:

But it also comes with a view of the roof, which gives us an unusual rear view of the tower of St Peter’s Church in Kensington Park Road:

A series of pictures show the market in full swing with the shops behind them in 1994:

See the comic shop Fantastic Store at 166 also visible in the picture below.

Two years later another business is at the same address (although the German food stall remains):

In 1997 an internet cafe opens at 195 with a mission to explain:

Despite the changes you could argue that the basic character of the street remained unaltered. Some of its long established institutions remain:

The Warwick Castle has been at 225 since the 19^th century.

Further up the road another long established (since 1974) institution carries on trading.

I sometimes think the 1990s were recent times, until I realise they were in another century and there’s more than a decade between then and now. Those years are retreating into history. Some things of course don’t change too much.

Back at the beginning of the street:

You can still find an obscure sports car parked near the Sun in Splendour just as we saw in the Portobello Road in the 70s post. (My transport correspondent says it’s not a Lamborghini, a Ferrari or a Maserati – suggestions welcome)

And on Saturdays you’ll still see a crowd of people making their way down the narrow street from the top of the hill to the bottom.

Thanks to all the anonymous photographers and above all to Michael Robertson of the Planning Department.

Postscript

We now have two suggestions for the car parked near the Sun in Splendour – is it a Camaro Z28 (owned by Malcolm Wood) or a De Tomaso Pantera? Here is a bigger version of the picture:

At the moment I’m leaning towards the De Tomaso – see the picture below:

 

Ruins and reconstruction in North Kensington

The building below featured very briefly in the recent BBC programme on Portland Street in the “Secret history of our street” series.

It’s the Notting Hill Brewery which was located at the northern, least affluent, end of Portland Road. It was demolished in the late 1930s to make way for a new housing block, Nottingwood House, an example of progressive social housing for the time. The street is empty. Possibly because this was about to happen:

Destruction is a familiar theme in the history of North Kensington. There have been speculative house building programmes in the area from the 1850s onwards. Some have succeeded and some have failed. As in the programme the streets nearest Holland Park Avenue and Notting Hill High Street and Notting Hill Gate were the most likely to succeed and survive. Proximity to the new railways has also played a part, as light industry and animal husbandry gave way to housing.

There was another major factor of course.

Rackham Street and St Charles Square, as stark and grim as any purpose built gothic folly, just after the war. These bombed out ruins represent terror and loss of life for the people who lived there but bomb sites were also playgrounds for children growing up during and after the war. We’re all fascinated by destruction one some level.

The emptied streets are still and silent in an early morning at the end of the tumultuous war years.

Life went on among the ruins and for the children below, hanging around and playing near St Michael’s Mission Hall in Rackham Street, the bomb sites were a normal backdrop to their lives.

Destruction is also an opportunity for change and reconstruction.

Another view of the gasometer we saw above, a landmark which survived the war, with St Charles’ Hospital in the background.  In this 1951 picture allotments and pre-fabs have filled the bombed out area prior to re-building. Below the same view in early 1952.

Later in the 60s and 70s there was another wave of destruction and redevelopment as slum housing was demolished and local industry declined.

New building began again. Some projects, like the Westway brought their own form of destruction along with the spaces that would grow up beneath the motorway.

Other developments brought controversy. Here you can see the lower floors of Trellick Tower under construction.

We’ll come back to both those projects in future posts.

North Kensington has been knocked down and built again time again in its history, which is comparatively short by London standards hardly 200 years from fields to city.

We started here at the Notting Hill Brewery.

A group of residents proudly pose for a photograph showing they were not ashamed of where they lived.

By contrast, a different way of expressing defiance and a sceptical attitude to redevelopment is shown in this picture, while the Lancaster West Estate is being built in the background.

Thanks to Sue Snyder who started me off with the idea of the pictures of the Brewery but isn’t to blame for where I went afterwards.

 

Portobello Road in the 70s

Our last visit to the Portobello Road (see link in column two) proved to be quite popular so we’re returning there this week after a gap of twenty years or so. Now we’re well into what I think of as living memory. I made the point in the fifties post that some of the images could easily have come from the thirties rather than the fifties. By contrast some pictures from the seventies look almost contemporary to my eyes at least. The devil of time is as always in the details.

No Madam, I’m not going to go on forever about the nature of time and memory. Just to say that for me at least the concept of the present has expanded as I get older and it’s not too much of a stretch for me to consider any time in my adult life as the present day even though for some the early seventies have been consigned to the dustbin of history. You can stop yawning now Madam.

Back in the seventies then and for me any visit to the Portobello Road began here at the junction with Pembridge Road:

1973’s incarnation of the Sun in Splendour looking a little down at heel compared to the way it looks today. Pictures of Kensington or London in general from this time have some common characteristics. They look a little less crowded than modern streets, the cars look slightly alien (is that a Ford Frontenac on the right? Suggestions from car enthusiasts welcome) and of course you can imagine Regan and Carter dangerously swerving across your path in their Granada. Or Bodie and Doyle in a Capri for that matter. North Kensington was a favourite TV location at the time.

The road is narrow at this point. There were fewer shops and almost no stalls, although I recall one shop with hip merchandise on sale outside including boxes of bootleg LPs with their all white cardboard sleeves. The market itself didn’t really begin until you crossed Westbourne Grove and the slope down the hill got steeper.

This was and still is the antiques sector with dozens of stalls and the many arcades.

I don’t know if this man is a seller or a buyer but he looks like a market regular from one side of the stall or the other. Here’s another view slightly earlier:

Those three are almost certainly Saturday views. The view on a weekday would be more like this:

You can just see the spire of St Peter’s Church in the distance.

As the antiques stalls thinned out you began to see ordinary high street shops and family businesses. The stalls start to become devoted to food.

The Electric Cinema is visible in one of its periods of closure. The food market wasn’t confined to Saturdays but there were some weekdays when there were fewer stalls.

Eventually you came to the railway bridge and the Westway and a final set of stalls with books, second-hand goods of all kinds and yet more bootleg LPs. I don’t have a picture of this area in the same photo survey set as the others. The photographer was working on weekdays and there wouldn’t have been much to see at that point.  But in my memory the open area beyond the motorway seemed enormous, full of people. It was the epicentre of something although from this distance in time I can’t say what. I looked at the area on Google Street View this afternoon and it was much smaller than I remembered.

Past the Westway the street became much less busy. The view north from the junction with Cambridge Gardens:

In the final stretch to Golborne Road there was another of North Kensington’s many religious establishments, St Joseph’s Home across the road from the Dominican Convent:

Its bulk is disconcerting after the smaller scale of the market. At this point we seem to have taken a further step back in time.

I would never have made it this far on my Saturday afternoon trips to Portobello in the 70s. Somewhere around the Westway we would have found our way to a bus stop and either got the 52 back up to Kensal Rise, or the 31 making its way to Camden Town – in those days one of London’s most tortuous bus routes.

Here’s one final picture to get us back to the70s. The serious business of selling antiques which is both glamorous and seedy.

Postscript

I was told today that one of the stallholders featured in the 1958 photos I used in the Portobello Road in the 50s post from last year is still running a stall. She’s the woman in the checked coat here:

So congratulations to her. If you recognize any of the people featured in the blog I’d love to hear about it. I’ve met a few people who’ve found their way into the Local Studies collection and I always like to hear about them. Especially the three women in the first picture this week. Any ideas?