Notting Hill

Where it sits. Notting Hill is a district of West London inside the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, draped over a low clay hill between Holland Park Avenue in the south and the concrete deck of the Westway in the north. The core of it is the W11 postcode, with Ladbroke Grove running north to south as the spine and Portobello Road cutting a looser, older diagonal beside it. There is no official boundary; locals stretch the name across North Kensington, Westbourne Park and sometimes Kensal, while estate agents draw it much tighter. Four Underground stations serve the area — Notting Hill Gate on the Central, Circle and District lines, plus Ladbroke Grove, Westbourne Park and Latimer Road on the Hammersmith & City. The name is far older than the fame: it appears in the Patent Rolls of 1356 as Knottynghull, and the "Nott" element probably comes from the Saxon personal name Cnotta rather than from King Canute, as Victorian antiquarians liked to claim.

How the streets got their shape. The curves that make the district so photogenic are the fossil of a failed racecourse. In 1837 the Hippodrome was laid out around the hill, with spectators expected to watch from the summit; the heavy London clay waterlogged, a public right of way crossed the track, and the venture folded in 1841. When building resumed, the crescents followed the old racing lines, which is why Blenheim, Elgin, Stanley, Cornwall and Lansdowne Crescents all bend the same way. The landowner was James Weller Ladbroke, who from the 1820s worked with the surveyor Thomas Allason on the Ladbroke Estate; Allason's 1823 plan introduced the idea that still defines the neighbourhood — large private communal gardens enclosed behind terraces, entered only with a resident's key. St John's Church, built in 1845 in the Early English style, crowns the summit. Further west, around Pottery Lane, the ground was dug for brick and tile clay: the last surviving 19th-century tile kiln in London stands on Walmer Road, and Avondale Park was laid out in 1892 over a pit of pig slurry known as "the Ocean".

On screen. Notting Hill (1999), directed by Roger Michell, written by Richard Curtis and produced by Duncan Kenworthy, shot here for six weeks from 17 April 1998 with additional work at Shepperton Studios. The production had considered building an exterior set to control the crowds and decided against it; location manager Sue Quinn wrote to thousands of residents, promising a donation to each household's chosen charity, and roughly 200 charities were paid. Most of the street work happened in North Kensington. The specific addresses are still walkable:

• 280 Westbourne Park Road — the blue door of William Thacker's flat, in reality a house then owned by Richard Curtis himself
• 142 Portobello Road — the shopfront that played the travel bookshop
• The Coronet on Notting Hill Gate — the cinema where William watches Anna on screen
• Golborne Road and Lansdowne Road — supporting street scenes
• St Luke's Mews, off All Saints Road — four years later, the cue-card doorstep in Richard Curtis's Love Actually (2003)

About that door. The famous blue door was auctioned for charity at Christie's in 1999 and sold for £5,750. What stands at 280 Westbourne Park Road today is a replacement; it was painted black for a spell and is blue again now. Behind it is not a scruffy flat at all but a substantial house — the interior seen in the film was a studio build. The same caution applies at St Luke's Mews, where the pink-painted house is somebody's home. Both addresses are private residences on narrow residential streets with no visitor facilities. Photograph from the far pavement, keep the road clear, and do not ring the bell. The bookshop that inspired the plot was the real Travel Bookshop at 13 Blenheim Crescent; it closed in 2011 and the premises now trade as the Notting Hill Bookshop.

The other Notting Hill on film. The romantic comedy is only one layer. Richard Lester's The Knack …and How to Get It (1965) and Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell's Performance, shot in 1968 with Mick Jagger, both used these streets when they were cheap, subdivided and rough. Horace Ové's Pressure (1976) — the first British feature directed by a Black filmmaker — was made here about the same houses from the other side of the door, in the shadow of the 1958 race riots and the slum landlordism of Peter Rachman. Notting Hill Carnival, which grew out of that same Caribbean community, still runs along Westbourne Grove and up through Westbourne Green each August bank holiday.

Walking it. Start at Notting Hill Gate, climb Kensington Park Road, then drop into Portobello Road and work north to Golborne Road, where the Portuguese cafés and the flea-market end of the street feel least curated. Saturday is the full market day and by mid-morning the southern stretch is shoulder to shoulder; a weekday walk shows the architecture better. The pastel terraces most people photograph run along Lancaster Road, Denbigh Terrace and Colville Terrace, and the light is best in late afternoon, when the low sun runs straight down the east–west crescents.