Notting Hill c1948–c1970: Context, Housing and Sources

The historic environment study on Paper 1 Option 13 is Notting Hill between roughly 1948 and 1970. It is a focused local study worth 20 marks and is examined in Section A through two source-based questions. Question 1 (4 marks) asks you to make an inference from a single source; Question 2 (8 marks) asks you to evaluate the utility of a source for a specified enquiry. To answer both questions well you need two kinds of knowledge: knowledge of the place itself — its streets, its housing, its people, its events — and knowledge of the types of source available to historians of the area and how to use them.

This lesson sets out the contextual geography and social history of Notting Hill in the post-war period, together with the principal source types on which Edexcel may draw. Lesson 9 builds on it to examine the 1958 riots, the Cochrane murder, Claudia Jones's carnival and the longer community history.

Notting Hill: where is it, and what was it like in 1948?

Notting Hill sits in the north-western part of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, immediately west of central London. The core of the historic environment runs roughly from Ladbroke Grove in the west to Pembridge Villas in the east, and from Kensington Park Road in the south to Westbourne Park Road in the north. Key streets on the specification include Blenheim Crescent, All Saints Road, Powis Square, Colville Terrace, Westbourne Park Road, Elgin Crescent, Ladbroke Grove and Portobello Road.

The area was laid out in the middle decades of the nineteenth century as a speculative expansion of high-status London, with tall stucco-fronted terraced houses and paired villas on broad tree-lined streets. The 1851 census already records several thousand residents; by 1881 the district was almost fully built. These Victorian houses — four, five or six storeys including a basement and attic, with back gardens and mews stabling — were built for comfortable middle-class families with at least one live-in servant.

The First World War, the 1920s slump and above all the Second World War reversed that fortune. Many middle-class residents moved out to the suburbs; larger houses were subdivided into flats, bedsits and single rooms for rent. The area suffered bomb damage in the Blitz; parts of neighbouring Paddington and North Kensington were condemned. By 1948, Notting Hill was characterised by:

• Large Victorian houses subdivided into multiple tenancies (often twenty to thirty people in a single house originally designed for one family and four servants);
• Shared kitchens and single bathrooms per floor;
• Outdoor toilets and back yards; damp basements; rising damp in front areas;
• High tenant turnover and a significant number of HMOs (houses in multiple occupation);
• Low rents relative to Kensington to the south but rising demand from post-war arrivals;
• A pre-existing working-class white population and a small pre-war Black community.

The ward-level census data for 1951 and 1961 show the transformation. The 1951 census recorded about 1,200 residents born in the Caribbean in Kensington; the 1961 census recorded over 6,000, with much higher concentrations in North Kensington, including Notting Hill and Notting Dale.

flowchart LR
  A[Pre-1945 Notting Hill] --> B[Middle-class decline]
  B --> C[Post-war housing subdivision]
  C --> D[Low-rent, high-density multi-occupation]
  D --> E[Windrush arrivals 1948+]
  E --> F[Rapid demographic change 1951-1961]
  F --> G[1958 riots and beyond]

Rachmanism: exploitative landlordism in North Kensington

The name Peter Rachman (1919–1962) entered the English dictionary as the eponym of exploitative landlordism. Rachman, a Polish-Jewish refugee who had survived a Soviet labour camp during the Second World War and arrived in Britain in 1946, built up a substantial portfolio of slum housing in Notting Hill and surrounding streets by the late 1950s. His methods, exposed after his death through the 1963 Profumo Affair and the Scotland Yard investigation that followed, included:

• Buying low-value houses with long-term controlled tenants;
• Intimidating controlled tenants (often elderly) into leaving through anti-social tactics — loud parties, neglect of maintenance, hostile visits;
• Re-letting the vacant rooms at much higher rents to new arrivals, typically Caribbean migrants who could not rent elsewhere because of the colour bar;
• Holding the property through a chain of front companies to frustrate rent tribunals.

The 1957 Rent Act, which decontrolled rents on vacant possession, accelerated the process. The term "Rachmanism" was coined by the Labour MP Ben Parkin in a 1963 Commons debate and was subsequently adopted by Hansard, the press and academic writing.

Rachmanism matters historically for two reasons. First, it explains why Caribbean migrants concentrated so densely in Notting Hill: they were effectively excluded from council housing by residency rules and from much private renting by racial discrimination, and therefore channelled into the most exploitative end of the private rental market. Second, it shaped the subsequent community response — the Notting Hill Housing Trust (1963), the North Kensington Law Centre (1970, Britain's first), and the broader movement for tenants' rights and anti-discrimination housing legislation.

Caribbean settlement: arrivals, work and street life

Caribbean migration to Notting Hill followed the broader patterns described in Lesson 5 but with a distinctive local texture. Windrush arrivals in June 1948 were housed initially in the Clapham South deep shelter, and many found rooms in Brixton, the nearest area to the Colonial Office labour exchange. Brixton filled rapidly; Notting Hill absorbed a second wave from the early 1950s. By 1961, the North Kensington wards contained the largest Caribbean population in West London.

Migrants to Notting Hill worked in the same sectors as other Caribbean arrivals: London Transport, British Rail, the Post Office, the NHS and a wide range of factory and hospitality jobs. London Transport had opened a Barbados recruitment office in 1956 with loan-funded passage, and many Notting Hill residents worked on the Underground out of Ladbroke Grove station. In the evenings and weekends, a distinctive community life formed around:

• Shebeens — unlicensed drinking and music clubs in basements and first-floor flats, often running late into the night;
• Barber shops and hairdressers providing Black haircare;
• Caribbean groceries on Portobello Road, Golborne Road and All Saints Road;
• Churches — Pentecostal and Baptist congregations meeting initially in rented halls and private houses, later in acquired chapels;
• Sound systems — mobile reggae and ska audio rigs, carried by van, which played in community halls, backyards and, from 1966, on the streets during Carnival weekend;
• Mutual aid "pardner" schemes — rotating savings clubs enabling group members to build up deposits for housing and business.

Key Caribbean-run businesses included the Mangrove restaurant on All Saints Road, opened by Frank Crichlow in 1968 and a central site for the 1970 Mangrove Nine trial, and the Metro Club, a youth centre. Blenheim Crescent housed a cluster of early Notting Hill Housing Trust properties.

Small businesses and the street economy

A particular feature of Notting Hill in the 1950s and 1960s was the coexistence of long-established white working-class residents, including antique dealers and costermongers on Portobello Road, with a rapidly expanding Caribbean presence. The Portobello Road market, which had run since the late Victorian period, acquired an "alternative" Bohemian character in the 1960s as artists, musicians and students moved into the cheaper end of the area, alongside the Caribbean community.