North Kensington

North Kensington is an area of west London lying north of Notting Hill Gate and south of Harrow Road.

North Kensington is the key neighbourhood of Notting Hill. It is where most of the violence of the Notting Hill Race Riots of 1958 occurred, where the Notting Hill Carnival started and where most of the scenes in the film, Notting Hill were shot.

Even the area’s main transport hub, Ladbroke Grove tube station, was originally called Notting Hill from its opening in 1864 until 1880, and Notting Hill & Ladbroke Grove between then and 1919, when it was renamed Ladbroke Grove (North Kensington). It acquired its current more simple name in 1938. The area was also once served by St. Quintin Park and Wormwood Scrubs railway station, until it closed in 1940.

Estate agents now call the super-rich area to the south Notting Hill; they are in fact referring to the neighbourhoods of Notting Hill Gate and Holland Park.

North Kensington was once an area well-known for its slum housing, as documented in the photographs of Roger Mayne. Yet property prices have now reached dizzying heights as hordes of international investment bankers buy up the stuccoed Victorian houses.

Waves of immigrants have arrived for at least a century including, but certainly not limited to, the Spanish, the Irish, the Jews, the West Indians, the Moroccans and many from the Horn of Africa and Eastern Europe. This constant renewal of the population makes the area one of the most cosmopolitan in the world.

Though Ladbroke Grove is the area’s main thoroughfare, its best known street is Portobello Road with its street market. Many locals say that Golborne Road, at the northern end of Portobello Road, is a good representation of what Portobello Road was like before companies like Starbucks and American Apparel colonised Portobello.

North Kensington also has the largest Moroccan population in England.