Is this the UK’S Most divided street?
At one end, £6m homes and the stars’ favourite restaurant. At the other, sprawling 1930s estates housing some of the country’s most deprived families. And it even has its own ‘Berlin Wall’...
WITH its elegant houses daubed in pastel shades, designer boutiques, antique shops and art galleries, Portland Road lies at the heart of David Cameron country.
At The Cross, cashmere dressing gowns cost £400. Three doors along, model Kelly Brook and young Royals dine on lobster risotto and herb-crusted lamb at Julie’s restaurant, just a stone’s throw from the homes of Nicole Kidman, Jason Donovan and Matt Leblanc.
Yet while the street on the edge of Notting Hill in West London appears to be one of the most exclusive in Britain, it is also the most divided.
While wealthy businessmen, lawyers and bankers head for Portland Road’s chichi shops, just 600 yards away, behind black gates, lie Winterbourne House and Nottingwood House, sprawling red-brick Thirties estates for some of London’s most socially deprived people.
Residents on the estates are also divided from their more privileged neighbours by a traffic safety barrier dubbed the Berlin Wall.
The contrast is summed up by the house prices. Last year, 22 Portland Road, a five-bedroom semi with Bulthaup kitchen and private cinema, sold for £6million. At the other end, Flat 14 at Winterbourne House fetched a more modest £244,000.
The extraordinary story is revealed in a BBC documentary series that used a deprivation map – drawn up by Kensington and Chelsea Council in 2007 – to show that in Portland Road, some of the richest people in Britain are living side by side with some of the poorest.
It is a situation unparalleled throughout contemporary Britain.
Author Neil Hegarty, who co-wrote the book that accompanies the BBC series, said: ‘Portland Road has the most jarring of juxtapositions because those in the wealthiest five per cent and the poorest five per cent of London’s population live at opposite ends of the same road.’
Elpida Georgiou, an artist and mother of two who lives on the Winterbourne House estate, said: ‘We have to walk by those very affluent houses every day, which is a constant reminder of how poor we are. It’s things like that that chip away at your spirit.’
Built on a strip of wasteland during the 1850s housing boom, Portland Road was sandwiched between the exclusive Georgian and Victorian mansions of Notting Hill’s Ladbroke Estate to the east, and the downmarket Norland Estate – home to the ‘Piggeries and Potteries’, London’s most squalid gypsy camp – to the west.
When philanthropist Charles Booth created his poverty map of the capital in 1886, colour-coding the streets, he categorised the Ladbroke Estate
as yellow – ‘uppermiddle class, servant-keeping class’. The area to the west was black – ‘as deep and dark a type as anywhere in London...the lowest class of labourers, street sellers, loafers and criminals. Their life is the life of savages.’
Portland Road’s history is epitomised by No157. When George Andrews was born there in 1935, he lived with his parents and five siblings in two rooms on the ground floor.
‘The road was a slum but it was where we lived,’ said Mr Andrews, now a 77-year-old father of three and grandfather of five.
‘Two people lived on the floor above us, and at the top was an old soldier. We all shared the same toilet and a tin bath. The rent was 12s 6d a week for each family – the equivalent of 65p.
‘When we moved out of 157, it was gutted and suddenly it became a lovely house.’
Tim and Penny Hicks bought the property in 1968 for £11,750 after George’s parents were rehoused. They were among the first of a new wave of settlers. Mr Hicks said: ‘We were living in Chelsea and had too many children and a tiny house. We wandered down here and thought it may be a good place because it’s off Holland Park Avenue, which has always been pleasant. But this road was pretty grotty in those days.’
His wife added: ‘ We took a chance that the area was going to go up. My mother wasn’t pleased. She couldn’t understand why we wanted to leave Chelsea and come here but I’m glad we did.’
Her hopes about the area improving came true – in 2006, the house next door to the family was sold for £1.5 million.
A traffic barrier was erected by the council in 1975. Residents at the Holland Park end felt more secure – cut off from the estate to the north – and house prices eventually soared. Businessmen and bankers moved in.
In contrast, the council estate residents feel as alienated as East Berliners did before the fall of the Wall.
The Secret History Of Our Streets will be shown on BBC2 at 9pm on June 6.