Chop down trees? Not in my location, barks Kirstie

IT WAS immortalised as a heavenly part of West London where a bumbling bookseller can bump into a Hollywood star and live happily ever after in Richard Curtis’s rom-com.

But all is far from sweetness and light in Notting Hill, where Kirstie Allsopp and others are up in arms over plans by Mayor Sadiq Khan to carve a £42million, two-lane cycle highway through the area and the even leafier next-door neighbourhood of Holland Park, uprooting many much-treasured trees in the process. ‘My stepson is a cyclist, so is my brother and I have loads of cyclist friends, but I do not see the justification for the removal of the trees,’ Allsopp, pictured at this week’s Chelsea Flower Show, tells me. ‘Architecture students get taken to Notting Hill Gate to be shown how not to build — it’s a notorious wind tunnel. The fact that any trees have managed to grow there is a miracle. ‘They soften the landscape — and they’re cutting them down.’