Tourist hordes are destroying my beloved Notting Hill

Telegraph

2 days ago

We have to repaint our house in Notting Hill. (Bear with me. This will not be paint drying, I promise.)
When we bought it in 1992, it was a splotchy pink, like drying plaster, as was the one next door. These houses have always matched, the only two on the quiet street. When I was at secondary school in Hammersmith, I'd cycle past them every day, having dragged my bike from the festering bin cupboard in the basement of my mother's flat on the corner of Ladbroke Grove.
I'd hurtle down Elgin Crescent and would always look up at these two houses on the rise, surrounded by communal gardens on all sides. Their setting was operatic, romantic, and unattainable.
'I will live there one day,' a voice in my head would tell me, aged 16.
Fast forward 10 years, and I am pregnant with my first child, and living in a bijou blue-painted cottage in Hillgate Village behind Notting Hill Gate tube station with my soon-to-be husband, and house-hunting. He drives me to Clapham, and Camberwell, and explains how much bang we will get for our buck if we leave Notting Hill. He drives me to a fine townhouse on the common with a 'wealth of period features'.
My only knowledge of Clapham, Balham, Stockwell or Kennington was going to friends' house parties there, an experience always tinged with that anxiety that no cabbie would go south of the river after midnight, and panic that I couldn't afford a black cab anyway (I should say now that my son rents in Clapham and loves it and most of my day is spent sending him links to starter properties in Ladbroke Grove which he refuses to acknowledge).
We drove back north in silence. I was being entitled and obstinate. I am entitled and obstinate. In fact, I think it was during that drive that I made my position clear: I'm sure there were wonderful houses all over London, I said, but he should know that there were only three streets I was prepared to live in: Elgin Crescent, Lansdowne Road and Clarendon Road, all in W11.
It all sounds beyond spoilt written down. But I wanted to remain as close as possible to my mother, who had Parkinson's disease. I knew this decision – where to buy the family house – would be life-defining. It was like Eminem's Lose Yourself. I knew I had one shot to seize everything I had ever wanted in one moment of house purchase. My husband has never forgotten this little speech, as I had no money and wasn't buying the house and he was (my sole contribution was the baby, and then the Aga, if not in that order).
'All was quiet on the western front until that film'
And then this house came up – from where I write this now. One of the pink pair. There was a printing press in the basement. It was falling down, and uninsurable until it was underpinned. It was beyond our budget. But we (by that I mean 'he') pushed the boat out and bought it. It was not so much manifestation, I think, or my magical thinking – it was determination.
That was 1992. We camped in my mother-in-law's flat (in Lansdowne Road, so that was OK) while it was being done up and had the baby there and moved in some time the year after. We moved out for the underpinning and had two more babies and all was quiet on the western front until that film.
In 1999, Notting Hill the movie came out, and life has never been the same since. It didn't help that Hugh Grant jumped over the garden gate saying 'whoops-a-daisy' yards from my actual front door (when tourists come knocking, my husband, Ivo, always tells them, pointing far, far away from our house, 'Ah no, no, ha ha! It's not THIS GARDEN; it's over there!'). It didn't help that at the time, there really was an excellent travel bookshop in Blenheim Crescent, and a blue doorway where Rhys Ifans twirled for the paps in his Y-fronts.
The film turned the W11 postcode (the sort that estate agents called 'desirable' – that is, it was the sort of hood where media moguls rubbed shoulders with Notting Hill Tories such as David Cameron and George Osborne – and 'vibrant' – that is, everyone had a dope dealer) into a destination.
After that film, it was a bit bankers-goes-the-neighbourhood. It felt like that nice Richard Curtis had turned our home, our neighbourhood, into a theme park... for everyone else. I didn't help, either. I wrote a semi-autobiographical novel called Notting Hell (Penguin, 2006), whose main character, Mimi, i.e. me, was married to a man called Ralph, a moth-eaten Old Etonian, i.e. Ivo, who was more trout stream than fast lane.
My sequel, Shire Hell, had Mimi and Ralph downsizing for Dorset, and then, finally, there was Fresh Hell, when Mimi and family return to London, but can't afford Notting Hill and relocate to Queen's Park.
I had to provide a detailed glossary for all the US editions, so 'the Slut and Legless' was the Slug and Lettuce, a pub favoured by antipodean drinkers; Ribena, Babington House and so on are all in there.
'Hugh Grant woke me up at 6am every morning'
Interesting residential detail: Hugh Grant moved to Elgin Crescent for a few years. He was filming Paddington 2. He'd park his red Ferrari outside my house. Every morning at 6am, he'd rev the backfiring engine and wake me up as he roared off to the studios. Despite my man-sized crush on him I'd complain every time I saw him.
He applied successfully to join the tennis club up the road ('the single most humiliating experience of my adult life,' he reported afterwards – and that was not just because he was paired to 'play in' with the editor of Private Eye, an organ that has had its fun with our most clever, funny and handsome actor over the years). Then the Grants left, which was a shame, as I don't think he even played once at the club. 'I missed the superficiality of Fulham,' he explained.
The bookshop and the blue doorway have long gone, too, and my mother died in 2021 (having lived cheek by jowl with me, I'm glad to say, for the rest of her life), but still the hordes of tourists and, now increasingly, these mysterious, pointless influencers, come, to pose against the blossom and the ice-cream-coloured houses, even though the film was made almost 30 years ago.
The locals are understandably fed up. The Japanese girls come with suitcases of clothes and lighting and set up camp on their doorsteps for the TikToks, to the extent that some locals are now painting their houses black to put them off.
When Notting Hillers have to repaint (as we do), we are being encouraged to deter over-tourism and the scourge of the influencers by painting our houses black. 'It's clear that the bright and contrasting house colours are a major draw for photographs for social media accounts,' a letter seen by the London Standard has reported.
Will I paint it black? As things stand, the house is a yellowy off-white, a bit like English teeth. I'd love to go for an ice cream colour, but I don't think my minimalist neighbours would ever agree to one, so it's going to be the stone tones of Farrow & Ball's Clunch or String, I expect.
Second interesting property detail: Richard Curtis, who cast Hugh Grant, of course, in That Film, lived up the road, with his now wife, Emma Freud, for decades.
Now the man who put Notting Hill on the tourist map has moved to Hampstead, but I'm staying put. It's feet first for me.