Ancient streets
Kenneth Griffith
Kensington Geoffrey Evans (Hamish Hamilton £6.00) It comes as a surprise to most people who do not actually reside in the Portobello Road — and indeed to some who do — that the famed street of antiques and what-have-you is well within the bounds of the Royal Borough of Kensington. I learnt with interest from Mr Evans's valuable book that as recently as 1850 this road where I now live was called Portobello Lane and that it led to Portobello Farm. The farm was named thus to commemorate Admiral Vernon's capture of Puerto Bello in the Gulf of Mexico from the Spaniards in the year 1739.
Around 1850, Portobello Lane "was much favoured by Londoners as 'one of the most rural and pleasant walks . . .' and that cornfields and meadows lay on either side of the path meandering into Kensal Green." But then an awful metamorphosis overtook this rustic area. It became an awesome pig-raising centre, a • tough pottery area; and gypsies moved in en masse. The smell was appalling and a report by the Medical Officer of Health stated that out of every 1,000 children, 432 were dead before reaching the age of one year. Mr Evans relates that "there were many among the well-to-do in the rest of Kensington including some administrators, who were reluctant to acknowledge that North Kensington existed . . . ." Which only goes to prove — as I contemplate my smart friends south of Notting Hill Gate — that things don't change much. Today in the Portobello Road we are surrounded by piles of rotting rubbish and humans who have moved from pig-raising to pot-smoking and worse. .
Mr Evans delves far back. He tells us, for example, that there were two Saxon tribes: the Chenesi (probable derivation of Kensington) and the Cnottinga (probable root of Notting Hill) "who settled in the great clearing in the great forest of Middlesex, north of Holland Park Avenue, some time in the seventh century . . ." Well, that is the value of this book. Who with any sensitivity can ignore such knowledge of our neighbourhood's continuity? And that is only the beginning; Mr Evans carries us right through the evolvement of Kensington to the pathetic decadence of 1974. The book is a sophisticated and responsible guide to a socially very varied area of the great metropolis of London. It will be of most use to those people who are interested in where they are and how it happened, and who have at least some time to stand and stare — and think.
I was grateful to learn many facts. In particular that the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens — into which I fell as a boy and my eldest son, after me, also fell — was constructed on the orders of our German King, George the First. And I lapped up the anecdotes about Elizabeth, Lady Holland — a proper occupant of the great Liberal House of Holland. Recently I have been on the isolated island of Saint Helena making a film about Napoleon's life and death there. I read in Mr Evans's book about her Ladyship's preoccupation with floral horticulture and I remember that the island of Saint Helena is colourful with "Everlasting Flowers" because she sent the Emperor a few roots or seeds which he planted. What a strange and magnificent link between Kensington and our old Prison Colony of Saint Helena 4,400 miles into the South Atlantic Ocean.
The interiors of the great houses of Kensington are examined. Strangely enough I have been a guest in two of the houses described:
Aubrey House on Campden Hill and Tower House in Melbury Road. I write "strangely" because on both occasions I was invited home by two fellow-actors who lived respectively in these two houses. And on both visits I was unaware — until entering — that anything unusual was afoot. Imagine my astonishment, as I entered Aubrey House, when I felt certain that the picture at the end of my nose was a Whistler. And as I sat down to eat I gazed at a portrait and blurted out to my host: "My goodness — that painting is good enough to be a Rembrandt." To which he replied, "It is," and then added, "But that's a better Rembrandt over there." And, warming enthusiastically, leapt up demanding, "What do you think of this Goya?" I will never forget that evening because of the total unexpectedness of the glory, and because the meat at dinner was a bit underdone, and I am an incipient vegetarian. My host was my colleague Mr Jeffrey Wickham. Perhaps no less astonishing was entering The Tower House in Melbury Road, the home of Mr Richard Harris, who had asked me in for "a bit of a chat and a jar." If you want to know what exactly met my eyes as Mr Harris energetically moved me from one room to another, you must buy Mr Evans's book.
And I learn with delight that also in Melbury Road — number eighteen — the great Zulu King, Cetewayo, once stayed. May I remind you that it was some of his Impis that annihilated a battalion of British soldiers at the Battle of Isandhlwana in the year 1879. I could go on: the 'hoi polloi' of North Kensington. And the Royals, Harrods and now Biba of South Kensington. The great Museums. Little escapes Mr Evans's keen attention.
I'm all for this sort of book. Perhaps through a knowledge of our past, we might relearn a self-respect for our present and then there will be a glimmer of hope for our future. But let's be fair: all is not • lost. A Mr Henshaw of Kensington wrote in 1690: "You need onely inclose them in a piece of paper and superscribe it for me at my house neare Kensington, the penny post will bring it as safe as if you delivered it with your own hands." And our postmen in the Portobello Road are still first class. So are the Police — I wish the Official Rubbish Collectors were!
Kenneth Griffith, the actor and director, has recently written Thank God We Kept The Flag Flying, an account of Ladysmith
Fiction
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