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It’s an interesting technique which has probably now been replaced by digital methods of merging images.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:

 

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?

Portobello Road in the 50s

I was born in the 1950s so although I can’t remember much if anything about that era, because I was alive then it doesn’t seem to me like it should be described as the historical past. More like an annexe to the present. But looking at these pictures from 1958 demonstrates how far away from us the 50s are. No internet, no mobile phones, almost no television by comparison with today. Only a few subtle differences in this photograph could place it twenty years earlier.

North Kensington has not yet become a particularly bohemian or counter cultural area. These images are from the other side of a cultural divide. It’s a view of almost forgotten working class west London.

That’s Mr Brooks and his vegetable stall. A hard working photographer from the Ministry of Health took these photographs to illustrate a now forgotten display about food retailing. They would have been thrown away if the man who donated them to the Local Studies collection had not had been thinking of their value to later generations.

A little further down from Mr Brooks’ stall is a branch of the once ubiquitous Woolworth’s stores.

In this photo you can see the Electric Cinema looking a little grim but obviously open, one of the longest surviving institutions of Portobello Road. In 1958, according to that year’s Kelly’s it was trading as the Imperial Playhouse.

But fruit and vegetable stalls in gloomy streets are not the whole Portobello story even in the late 50s. The market even then was an outlet for antiques, bric a brac and other second hand goods as shown in another set  of photographs from the same period.

I think you can see a couple of penguin paperbacks on top of the pile of books.

I couldn’t resist including this one. Some kind of basket made out of a dead armadillo. Try getting one of those on e-Bay.

This set of photographs seem brighter and more optimistic to my 21^st century eye. Perhaps it’s just that they were taken on a sunny day or perhaps it’s the fact that the people in the pictures are not buying food but browsing for more interesting items.

The 1950s are still a long way off though. Look at this final image:

A trio of excited young women examine the contents of a stall selling jewellery. The detail that caught my eye was that all three are wearing gloves. So we’re still on the other side of that cultural divide.

The next time we go to the Portobello Road it will be to the 1970s a far more familiar era.

Thanks to the unknown Ministry photographer and to Corry Bevington who took the other photographs which are from the HistoryTalk collection.