If only Notting Hill’s influencers could post socially useful media

IT was hard not to smirk upon reading news of a battle to end all battles: the Notting Hillers, inordinately proud of their pastelcoloured cottages, grand white villas and local Portobello Market, versus the preening Instagrammers, who’ve decided this is the perfect location for their perfect-life shoots.

Young women with perfect hair and coy smiles keep turning up in droves on W11 doorsteps for impromptu photo-shoots, with a range of pretty dresses and even pop-up tents to get changed in. Grumpy notices have started appeared telling them to f-off. One resident has complained of being “hounded by the paparazzi”. What a face-off.

If Richard Curtis’s Notting Hill made you want to heave, don’t search for #nottinghill on Instagram, as you’ll find a cutesy gallery of pink and lavender, blossom on cherry trees, and girls trying to look as vacuous as possible for the camera, lest we think they have a care in the world. “Be thankful for your life, spend time in nature, breathe deeply, let go of your worries,” says one girl in a ballgown against a set of iron railings.

Notting Hill: once the most famous slum in London, home to the Windrush incomers and poor white working class, where Oswald Mosley stood for election, and where photography was most likely show kids playing on street corners because as Alan Johnson — postieturned-Labour Home Secretary who grew up in the area — noted: “Here it was better to be outdoors than in.” Imagine if the Instagrammers went out not to smart, modern day W11 but to our poorer districts — could they create socially useful media? Just a thought.

And as for the Notting Hill residents who’ve spent so long choosing a Farrow & Ball colour for their front door, I fear that this Instagrammers’ invasion has caused such rage because it has struck their deepest anxiety: that the lives they lead are a cliché.