Escorts in Notting Hill, W11: who is close, and how soon
At dusk in November, when the lamps come on along Lansdowne Road and the stucco on the crescents takes the colour of the sky, Notting Hill looks like a place that was always this settled and this expensive. It was neither. Within living memory these streets were a byword for crowded rooms and bad landlords; before the houses there was a racecourse; and down the slope from the racecourse lay brickfields and pig yards. Most of that story is still in plain sight, and an evening walk can read it.
For escorts in Notting Hill the board looks a little way off: no name on it lives in W11, three live in Paddington to the east and three in South Kensington to the south. The office's usual word is around an hour from its confirmation to her arrival, more in the evening rush, and the lengths and figures sit on the rates. What follows is the hill's own story, which is the best conversation W11 has to offer.
On the ground
Notting Hill in practice
Landmarks on the arrival slip
By postcode, never by nameW2 4DU, W11 4UL, W2 4RJ, W8 4PT.
Nearest stations
Walking timeNotting Hill Gate, 1 minute. Bayswater, 6 minutes. Ladbroke Grove, 8 minutes.
Getting there
W11Travel is included across Zones 1 and 2, and counted from the moment the hour is set rather than from when she leaves.
On the board
Nearest prints to Notting Hill
Who works here
On the board in Notting Hill
The six prints above are a first shortlist for Notting Hill tonight. Any of the twenty eight on the who is free page can be asked for by name instead.
Note 02
A name older than any house
The name is first written down in 1356, as Knottynghull, and nobody is certain what it meant; a hill belonging to a Saxon family called Cnotta is the favourite guess. For most of the next five centuries it was farmland on a low rise west of London, crossed by the Uxbridge road, whose line is now Notting Hill Gate and Holland Park Avenue.
The Gate in the name was real. A turnpike stood on that road taking tolls from westbound traffic, and it lasted until 1864. The busy junction by the station keeps the name of a barrier that has been gone for over a century and a half.
Note 03
The racecourse that lost to the clay
In 1837 a speculator named John Whyte opened the Hippodrome, a racecourse looping round the hill, with the summit as a natural stand for spectators. It failed within a few years. The heavy clay drained badly, the going was often dreadful, and local people insisted on an old right of way across the course, walking through the fences while the horses ran.
By the early 1840s the racing had stopped. St John's church went up on the summit in 1845, on the ground where racegoers had watched, and the crescents built on the slopes below, Lansdowne Crescent among them, are often said to follow the line of the old track. Whether or not the builders meant it, walking them after dark feels like going round a course.
Note 04
The Ladbroke estate and its hidden gardens
The land belonged to the Ladbroke family, and from the 1840s it was built up as a speculation in stucco villas and terraces. Its best idea was the communal garden: rather than facing a square across a road, many houses back straight onto a shared garden kept for the residents, so most of the estate's green is out of sight from the pavement. Ladbroke Square, the largest, is one of the biggest private garden squares in London.
The speculation did not run smoothly. Building stopped and started with the money markets, several builders were ruined before the estate was complete, and some streets stood half finished for years. Seen today from Ladbroke Grove or Kensington Park Road, it looks so assured that it is hard to believe anyone lost money on it.
Note 05
Potteries and piggeries
Down the western slope lay a different world. Around what is now Pottery Lane, brickmakers dug the London clay for their kilns, and pig keepers moved out from the centre of town set up their yards beside them. The district was known as the Potteries and Piggeries, and its reputation for disease lasted most of the Victorian age.
One bottle-shaped kiln survives on Walmer Road, the last of its kind here. Avondale Park, opened in the 1890s, was laid out over a stagnant lake of slurry that local people called the Ocean. Both are within easy reach of the crescents on foot, and they show better than any book how close the smart and the squalid once stood.
Note 06
Portobello: a farm, a victory, a market
Portobello Road began as the lane to Portobello Farm, which took its name from Admiral Vernon's capture of Porto Bello, on the Caribbean coast of Panama, in 1739. The lane became a street as the estate filled in, and a market grew along it in the later nineteenth century, fruit and vegetables at first; the antiques it is known for came after the Second World War.
The street has its writers too. George Orwell lodged at number 22 in 1927, back from police service in Burma and setting out to become a writer, and a blue plaque marks the house.
Note 07
Hard years and a carnival
By the 1950s many of the big houses had been cut into single rooms let at high rents, and one landlord, Peter Rachman, gave his name to the practice. The newly arrived Caribbean community, often housed worst of all, was attacked in the riots of 1958. The answer began a tradition: Claudia Jones organised an indoor Caribbean carnival in 1959, and a neighbourhood street festival in 1966 grew into the Carnival that now takes over these streets at the end of each summer.
The Westway, opened in 1970, cut across the north of the district on concrete stilts, and the long climb from those years to today's prices is the most recent chapter of a hill that has reinvented itself every few generations.
Note 08
An evening inside the old fabric
Notting Hill Gate station is itself a piece of the story: the Central line and the older Circle and District station were separate until 1959, when they were joined under one ticket hall below the road. Up on the street, the Coronet opened as a theatre in 1898, and the Electric on Portobello Road has been a cinema since 1910, so a film here is watched inside the history rather than beside it.
Notting Hill escorts on this board suit that kind of evening: a screening, a table, then the crescents in the dark. From here Holland Park lies west along the old Uxbridge road, Bayswater east, and Kensington down the hill to the south. The who is free page shows this week's names.
From The Roundup
Two notes worth reading for Notting Hill
Asked most often
Notting Hill, asked and answered
Where exactly did the racecourse run?
Why is it called Portobello Road?
Is anything left of the Potteries?
Can the estate's private gardens be seen from the street?
What does the old name Knottynghull mean?
One zone either way
Next along from Notting Hill
escorts in High Street Kensington
W8Same ladder, same honest hour, one zone further across the map.
Last strip
Say a name and an hour
Write in with a length, a time and the zone you are staying in, and a name from the board comes back with a window attached. That is the whole of the arrangement.