Portobello Road Market

Where it sits. Portobello Road runs almost the entire length of Notting Hill, north to south, roughly parallel to Ladbroke Grove and one street east of it, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It is not flat, which surprises people: the northern end sits about 84 feet above sea level, dips to around 65 feet, then rises again to roughly 78 feet at the southern end, an average gradient of under two per cent that you feel in your calves by the end of a market day. The market stretch measures about 940 metres, from Golborne Road at the north to Westbourne Grove at the south. A third of the way down from the north it passes under the twin bridges of the Westway and the Hammersmith & City line, and that shaded section is where the second-hand clothing and streetwear trade concentrates.

The story behind the name. Before about 1740 this was Green's Lane, a country path from the Kensington Gravel Pits — today's Notting Hill Gate — north towards Kensal Green. Portobello Farm was built around 1740 near what is now Golborne Road and took its name from Admiral Edward Vernon's capture of the Spanish-held town of Puerto Bello, in modern Panama, at the 1739 Battle of Porto Bello during the War of Jenkins' Ear. Vernon Yard, a small turning off the road, still carries the admiral's name. The lane became a street piecemeal in the second half of the 19th century, squeezed between the new estates of Paddington and Notting Hill; its shops served the wealthy households in the crescents while its own residents worked as builders, servants, coachmen and costermongers. After the Hammersmith and City Railway opened Ladbroke Grove station in 1864, the northern end filled in and the last fields disappeared. Portobello Farm itself was sold in 1864 to a Dominican order, who built St Joseph's Convent on the site.

The market. Portobello began as a food market in the 19th century. Antique and bric-a-brac dealers arrived in the late 1940s and 1950s and gradually took over the character of the place; it is now the largest antiques market in the United Kingdom. Saturday is the only day all five sections trade at once — antiques, second-hand goods, clothing and fashion, household essentials, and fruit, vegetables and other food. On other days you will still find fruit and veg, bric-a-brac and clothing, but the antique arcades at the southern end are the Saturday event. The arcades matter as much as the street stalls: many dealers work from small covered galleries off the pavement, and prices swing wildly between the tourist-facing front tables and the specialists inside.

On screen. Portobello is one of the most filmed streets in London, and the credits are more varied than the obvious one. Ealing's police thriller The Blue Lamp (1950), with Dirk Bogarde and Jack Warner as PC George Dixon, shot on location around Paddington, Notting Hill and Portobello, and preserves the road as it looked before the Westway was driven overhead — including a car chase down largely empty streets. The 1971 Disney musical Bedknobs and Broomsticks built its "Portobello Road" song-and-dance number on sets at the Burbank studios in California rather than here, though the lyrics catalogue the real market and its traders. Notting Hill (1999) put the street at the centre of its story, with the travel bookshop front at 142 Portobello Road and the celebrated seasons sequence walking south through the stalls. In the Paddington films, Alice's Antiques at the southern end plays Mr Gruber's antique shop. The Portobello Film Festival has been held around the road every August since 1996, and the community station Portobello Radio launched in 2015.

What you actually see today. The Grade II*-listed Electric Cinema at 191 Portobello Road is among the oldest working cinemas in Britain and worth a look for the frontage alone. The architecture along the road is mostly mid- to late-Victorian terrace with shops cut into the ground floors, and the plots are narrow, which gives the street its jostling texture. Golborne Road at the north end keeps a strong Portuguese and Moroccan presence — pastéis de nata, tiled café fronts, a rougher flea market on the pavement. The road is a case study cited in urban geography for commercial gentrification: rising rents and tourist volume have pushed out traditional traders, and the Friends of Portobello campaign against chain retail is an active local force rather than a nostalgic one.

Getting there and timing. Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park stations are the practical approaches from the north, Notting Hill Gate from the south. Saturday crowds peak between about 11am and 3pm; arriving at 8am gets you the dealers' hour, when serious buyers work the antiques arcades before the pavement fills. Friday is the quiet compromise. The road is level enough underfoot but the pavements are narrow, the surface is uneven in places and market days make wheelchair or pushchair progress slow. Cash is still useful at the smaller stalls, and haggling is expected in the antiques trade and unwelcome in the food stalls.