15 DECEMBER 2007, Page 57

Sunlight on stucco

Rachel Johnson NOTTING HILL by Derry Moore Frances Lincoln, £14.99, pp. 127, ISBN 9780711227392 © £11.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 This affordably handsome book confirms in my own partisan mind what a rich subject the area of Notting Hill in London is, and I can't help approving of it for that reason alone.

Like it or not, Notting Hill exerts a peculiar fascination over many who don't live there as well as all who do, but it is the latter who will fall on this book with cries of pleasure. It is a solid rebuff to those who prefer to think that Notting Hill is not so much a place of bricks and mortar, but an annoying media construct instead.

As a resident of two decades' standing, I can confirm that the photographer's wellcomposed vistas of gleaming stucco and Italianate churches, of sun-soaked plane trees, beautifully tended communal gardens (formerly known as 'paddocks), of specimens such as the playwright Simon Gray, or the butcher David Lidgate, have been rendered fair and square. Deny Moore has not needed to apply the rosy-tinted Vaseline to his lens, as if photographing a fading beauty. He is recording the district at its apogee.

The ornamental gardens and public drives are reaching their peak of perfection too, as Moore notes: 'In the early years ... by the time the trees had reached maturity, the buildings were becoming neglected.' Today, with the trees and gardens in their prime and the buildings properly cared for, he says, the vision of the man who planned the Ladbroke Estate, Thomas Allom, 'is probably nearer realisation than at any previous time'.

The strongest shots in the book are the bare streetscapes, made to look like dramatic stage sets, and angled to reveal the vistas and overlaps of the area's intricate, maze-like layout, pictures which reveal that Moore's real joy and interest is in recording window pelmets and street railings and the way that sunlight falls on stucco, and not the area's celebrities, markets, bars and shops. His pictures of antiques, children, the carnival, bric-a-brac and flower stalls are ones that, I fear, we have all probably seen many times before.

His ascetic eye and steady lens make stars not of the bustling market nor of prep-school moppets in uniform, but of the ironwork in Ladbroke Gardens or the cobbles in Campden Hill Square. He is interested in the bones of Notting Hill, not the flesh, and he is right to be — for these are the features that will remain long after those of us who have lived in these storied streets have departed.