Neighbourhoods

London is often described as a collection of distinct urban villages rather than a single sprawling metropolis, due to the way it developed over time. Discover each neighbourhood's unique character and charm.

Notting Hill & Holland Park

Painted stucco crescents, the longest street market in London, and the carnival that closes it all in August.

Pastel-painted terraced houses along Portobello Road in Notting Hill, in pink, blue and yellow — Portobello Road's painted houses. Photo by Maggie Jones from London, England, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A crowded shopfront on Portobello Road: a painted chef figure, a big tin fish, a white metal mask, a silver bowl with stag's-head handles and flowered china, stacked in front of a red-painted antiques shop. — Alice's, on Portobello Road. Photo by David, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Kyoto Garden in June: a still pond edged with rocks, a pink-flowering shrub in front, pines leaning over the water and tall trees under a blue sky with white clouds. — The Kyoto Garden in Holland Park, given by Kyoto in 1991. Photo by Bex Walton, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Two neighbourhoods with one story between them. The land was clay, dug for bricks and tiles, and there were piggeries on the slope where pig-keepers pushed out of Marble Arch had settled; a racecourse called the Hippodrome ran round the hill from 1837 and closed four years later, defeated by mud and by a public footpath nobody could close. James Weller Ladbroke then laid the hill out from the 1820s in the crescents you see now, with communal gardens behind the terraces rather than in front of them. By the 1950s the big houses had been carved into rooms and let, often by Peter Rachman, whose name became a word for exploiting tenants. West Indian families settled here because they were among the few places that would take them, and in 1958 white gangs attacked their homes for the better part of a week. What grew out of that is the Notting Hill Carnival, held since 1965 over the August bank holiday, and now a street festival of over a million people. Portobello Road runs almost the length of the district and holds the market: antiques on Saturday, fruit and vegetables the rest of the week, everything else in between. Holland Park at the southern end is the quiet counterweight: woodland, peacocks, a Japanese garden, and the ruin of a Jacobean house bombed in 1940, where opera is staged each summer.