Is Notting Hill really 'cool' again?

Why are the press so keen to make W11 the 'go-to postcode'?

Last week The Evening Standard announced that west London was “cool again” and declared W11 “the go-to postcode for those in the know”. This revelation is backed up by some stock imagery of Harry Styles and Kiera Knightley who, we are told, are the area’s ‘celebrity locals’.

Except Harry’s mini property empire (three houses, costing around £15 million in total) is actually up the road in Hampstead Heath (NW3) and Kiera lives down the road from him in Canonbury (N1). But that’s really beside the point - we’re just telling you this because it shows that the Standard’s idea of fact checking apparently extends only as far as reading this estate agent’s website, which lists the pair in a search engine-sucking article titled Celebrities That Have Lived Or Live In Notting Hill (we can only imagine they’ve mixed Kiera up with the character she played in Love Actually - that pink mews house definitely is in Notting Hill).

Misplaced celebs withstanding, the Standard wants us to know that W11 is ‘the new wild west’ because its traditional old restaurants and bars are being replaced by a “slew of openings” that have made Notting Hill “the city’s hottest neighbourhood”.

Now, we wouldn’t even have bothered mentioning this glorified listicle if it wasn’t for the fact that, on Monday, the Financial Times also ran a long piece under the headline Notting Hill hip? How the west was (re)won. Once again, it’s the presence of “a new wave of restaurants” that’s credited here for helping Notting Hill get “its edge back”. Which is fucking hysterical when you consider that W11 has had about as much edge as a spoon for at least forty years now.

Rewriting history

Let’s look at the Standard and FT’s versions of history, to see what constitutes ‘hip’ in their eyes, and when W11 might have been it.

For their arbiter of cool, The Standard leans heavily on local entrepreneur, Chris D’Sylva. We’ll tell you more about Chris in a moment, but for now you just need to know that he’s been in Notting Hill since about 2005 (if this Forbes article is accurate) and he has some pretty weird ideas about the evolution of his neighbourhood. Here’s what he told the Standard:

“Back in the 2000s, on any given Thursday, Friday or Saturday night, I could walk down the road and pop into all these house parties without knowing anyone,” he says with a chuckle. “It was this great, open, useful area to be in.” He takes an uncharacteristic pause. “And then 2008 happened, all this banker money moved in, which made it unaffordable for the kids to come. So there was this migration of youth and creativity from west to east.”

So, according to Chris, there were three glorious years in the mid noughties, where anyone could wander uninvited into people’s houses. But that nirvana was obliterated in 2008, when… What? … The global financial crisis forced all the bankers to move in and all the cool ‘kids’ moved out to Dalston?

Chris is clearly smoking crack, so let’s see what the FT’s timeline looks like:

“In the early ’90s, west London enjoyed a bustling food scene. Richard Curtis had yet to transform the ’hood into the star of its own Hollywood movie. Notting Hill had 192 on Kensington Park Road – and a five-minute walk away was All Saints Restaurant, which sat on the eponymous street. They were unarguably the beating heart of the creative cultural community.”

Okay, we’ve gone back another decade to the pre-Hugh Grant era, and at least there is a sniff of truth to this. As Ladbroke Grove resident Cathi Unsworth pointed out when we spoke to her earlier this year, “[west London] definitely lost its edge, thanks to Hugh Grant and that blue door, which meant all the Americans were suddenly not scared to come here!”.

This is backed up by some numbers Savills put together, which showed that in the five years following the release of the Curtis film, property prices in Notting Hill went up by 66%, double the amount they did in the rest of London.

But anyone with a passing knowledge of London history knows that Notting Hill’s gentrification really kicked off in the 80s when wealthy families began buying up all those massive stucco-fronted, pillar-porched houses that had previously been carved up by unscrupulous landlords like Peter Rachman.

It was only in the years before then that Notting Hill had what any right-minded person might term ‘edginess’. We haven’t got the time or space to go into that level of historical detail here, especially as other people have already done a good job if it. This post from North Kensington Histories on the ‘seedy clubs and dives’ of Notting Hill is a good place to start.

The C word

It’s not really ‘edginess’ that W11’s new wave of restaurateurs are after when they’re comparing themselves to places like Hackney. It’s their sense of ‘community’.

“I suddenly found I was surrounded by all these fantastic, dynamic musicians and artists, and by a fiercely loyal neighbourhood,” the chef Jackson Boxer tells the Standard about his beloved W11. “And I thought well, if Hackney can have hundreds of these creative places to eat, Notting Hill could support at least one or two.”

Jackson, we are told, opened his Kensington Park Road restaurant Orasay “sort of by chance,” (which is the kid of thing you can do when your mum was the cookery writer Lady Arabella Stuart, and your grandad was the eighteenth Earl of Moray), and that the dynamic local neighbourhood he was so enamoured by featured “the Ledbury, of course, Clare Smyth [at] Core, and then there was Emily Roux at Caractère”. In case you haven’t already guessed, none of these places are the kind of accessible ‘creative places to eat’ that generally build a genuine sense of community.

The FT insists though that Notting Hill is now “beginning to feel more like a real community again” thanks to these new eateries that are providing “the kind of social theatre that makes all the difference”. We’re really not sure what the phrase ‘social theatre’ means in this context, but the FT seems to think that it is exemplified by where the aforementioned D’Sylva buys his sandwiches: