The View from Rot-Hill
LONDON
By DAVID REES
Here while the town in damps and darkness lies, They breathe in sunshine and see azure skies; Each walk with ropes of various dyes bespread, Seems from afar a moving tulip-bed, Where rich brocades and glossy damasks glow And Chintz, the rival of the showery bow.
The historical background is less complex than many London boroughs. There is a Domesday reference in 1086 (Mr. William Gaunt, in his study of Kensington, bravely speculates that 'A tribesman called Cnotta may have been the Saxon Napoleon of Notting Hill'), followed by a mediwval church and manor CAbbot's Kensing- ton) developed over the parallel lines of the two Roman roads to the south-west, preserved today in High Street and Bayswater Road. Then, in the seventeenth century, came the three great houses, two of which remain to this day. First, there was Holland House, blitzed beyond repair in the second war and now a youth hostel; it was followed by Campden House, which stood near today's Sheffield Terrace, where the Notting Hill plateau begins its descent to High Street; and lastly, came the Palace, rebuilt from a slightly earlier house by William III, whose statue still stands in front of that austere facade as he stares at the traffic on Kensington Road.
At much the same time the 'old court suburb' of Kensington Square sprang up, and King Billy's successors built the Orangery and laid out Kensington Gardens, together with the Round Pond and the Broad Walk. During the next century the hamlets of Brompton, Earls Court and of the ..`gravel pits' around the toll- gate of Notting Hill congealed until the great building boom of the nineteenth century pro- duced the Kensington of today—in appearance the most Victorian of all London boroughs; it seems only fitting that the title of royal borough was given in the year of the Queen's death. Thus the literary and historical associations of the borough lie heavy on the ground, impossible to escape: the Palace and the Georgians; the Square where Thackeray and John Stuart Mill lived and worked, and ruined now by the shadow of the big stores; Holland House with its roll call of the great from Horace Walpole to Macaulay; and .the later Victorian circle of G. F. Watts and his adherents in 'Little Holland House' in the area of the present-day Melbury Road. One can see why Eliot, who was a churchwarden at St. Stephen's, Gloucester Road, at first thought of calling his great poem The Kensington Quartets.'
But the artistic, high-bourgeois world of the Victorians and the Edwardians has long since vanished; perhaps it lingered on until 1939, merging on the way into the image of Kensing- ton as a place of stifling respectability, now an inaccurate image which yet still endures.
Yet out of this old Kensington that ended with the war has emerged a new Kensington centred around Notting Hill Gate. Like the old Kensington, its boundaries are imprecise. It ex- tends southwards from Westbourne Grove, sprawling into Bayswater and Campden Hill to- wards Kensington High Street. From east to west it runs along the line of Bayswater Road-Holland Park Avenue, from Arnold's 'lone, open glades' of the Round Pond to the gardens of Holland House. From north to south its great axis is the line of Church Street and the Portobello Road, that fantastic, half-mile-long world's fair that plays every Saturday.
In the shadow of the 200-foot-high slab of Campden Hill Towers which rose at the rate of a storey a week out of the wreckage of the old Gate in that affluent summer of 1959, lies the new, reconstructed Notting Hill Gate. Moreover, in the last few years Notting Hill has been on the tourist track as never before.. When the blossom comes out during late April in. Bruns- wick Gardens, people make movies about it, and quite rightly. Yet there are still echoes of other forces of the universe in the high crime rate; the small hours are disturbed by bawling fights and the tearing, rending sound of insolent chariots as they drive into each other and leave shattered glass on the pavements for the morning.
Yet these are excrescences; in the pubs on Church Street and the Portobello and in the afternoon drinking clubs there is a serious, relent- less search for distraction. And here, perhaps, one may invoke two great writers, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, whose spirit lies over Notting Hill. As Miss Patricia Hutchins has recently reminded us in her study of Ezra
Pound's Kensington, it was in 10 Church Walk, off Holland Street, that Pound found his `Ken- sington Graveyard' in the years before 1914. It was Pound who called the area Rotting Hill, and so well did he know Kensington that when he came to write the Cantos a lifetime after his days in Church Walk we can see that he remem- bered in great detail that lost Edwardian Ken- sington. Moreover, long after he met Pound in pre-1914 Kensington, Wyndham Lewis settled down in the 1930s at 29 Notting Hill Gate, a site now demolished to make room for the re- development scheme. But Lewis returned to Notting Hill after his disastrous war-time exile in North America, and there he wrote both Rotting Hill and Self Condemned, continuing to live at No. 29 until his death in 1957. (The friendship between the two men endured to the end of Lewis's life; less than three years before his death we find Pound writing in December 1954 'to confirm HIGH opinion of "Self-Cridd"/ it and Rot-Hill all, past 2nd hell lit/yet dis- covered among ruins of Albion. Shd/git yu the Nobble . . .') Yet reading of Pound's days in Kensington one realises how little the area has changed. The physical structure of the district is unchanged, in spite of all the surface rebuilding and the acres of progressively decaying houses now turned into rachitic flats and bed-sitters, those streets in North Ken where entire lorry-loads of rubbish are dumped under cover of darkness—a 'growing menace,' according to a recent issue of the Kensington Post. What is new, replacing the effortless sense of superiority and progress that buttressed that earlier royal borough, is the sense of uncertainty: for, manifestly, in the Notting Hill Gate of the mid-1960s the centre has long since ceased to hold. Down the road to the Gate, past the trees and seedy Victorian elegance of Pembridge Square, is the sign- board of the `Sindh Sufi Philosophical and Mystic Society; teachings and publications of the Sufi sages of the East.' In the local newspaper shops the Occult Gazette (next month : 'The Auric flame as the Birth of divinity') sells by the quire, a splendid example of the quintessential fifth- century atmosphere of Rot-Hill, a memorable synthesis of sophistication and barbarism.
So today, the Genetesque storm-troopers, the rich kinksters on the Portobello and the switched- on birds in the boozers perform the Rotting Hill follies; tomorrow, who knows? One can only hope that this Cockaigne of debauched Patrick Hamiltonian respectability, ' etiolated, drunken Saturday afternoons and lazy days close to the reassuring Orangery with its bust of Marcus Aurelius will at least last for a little longer before it finds its Gildas . . .
and the Serpentine will look just the same
and the gulls be as neat on the Pond, and the sunken garden unchanged.
and God knows what else is left of our London,
• my London, your London. (Canto 80)
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