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London's inexorable advance into the surrounding home counties is matched by smaller identity crises in its heart: as the drive to provide new housing and new amenities gathers pace, historic markers come under threat, and new communities emerge. A good example is the Ladbroke Grove area in North Kensington, named after the land inherited by James Weller Ladbroke in 1819. Instead of building his own estate there, he hoped to capitalise on the housing boom of the period, and entrusted his surveyor, Thomas Allason, with the task of developing it as an investment. Its subsequent history was chequered, to say the least: speculative building was a risky business. But eventually, a mix of building styles filled the area between the Harrow Road and Notting Hill, spreading out either side of the road still called Ladbroke Grove. Despite this central spine, the area designated as W10 is increasingly elided with Notting Hill Gate (W11), at its north-east.
Yet Ladbroke Grove, as Joan Grant sets out to prove in this booklet, has acquired a proud history of its own. The earliest historic markers are, naturally, mid- to late-Victorian. They include the Elgin pub of 1862, which still has some of its original features, and the old workhouse infirmary, built in 1881 for the St Marylebone Poor Law Union, and substantially still in use today as St Charles' Hospital. Other reminders of the Victorian past are its churches, for example the impressive Romanesque St Michael's, built on Ladbroke Grove in 1871 by James Edmeston Jr and James Stemming Edmeston.
Left to right: (a) The Elgin pub, on the corner of Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park Road. (b) St Charles' Hospital, on Exmoor Street, just west of Ladbroke Grove. (c) St Michaels' Church on Ladbroke Grove.
The area also had its share of notable Victorian residents: around the 1870s, we learn, the Caribbean-born Fanny Eaton, who modelled for Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other well-known artists of the time, lived for a while in Lancaster Road, which crosses Ladbroke Grove towards the edge of Notting Hill. Among the other black people living in this part of London was Amanda Aldridge, daughter of the actor Ira Aldridge, who earned her living here as a singing teacher. Yes, there were tensions — Grant covers the race riots of 1958 — but the generally happy outcome of this influx of newcomers would be the celebrated Notting Hill Carnival, following a successful “Festival of Notting Hill” in 1966.
Study of Fanny Eaton (Head of a Mulatto Woman), 1861, by Joanna Boyce Wells.
As times changed, some of the older buildings completely disappeared: the gas holders from the old gasworks, established at the top of Ladbroke Grove as long ago as the mid-1840s, where coal was processed into "town gas” for lighting and heating, were finally removed only in 2021. But other structures, such as the many Victorian laundry businesses, disappeared earlier, making way for new kinds of buildings for new residents. Car manufacturers, operating here from the earliest years of the twentieth century, came and went. Cinema arrived — and lasted. The Electric Cinema opened on Portobello Road, which runs close beside Ladbroke Grove, in 1910, and this still stands, its exterior unchanged and its interior retaining its period charm. Another sign of the times was the opening of a birth control clinic on Telford Road, just off Ladbroke Grove in 1924. There is nothing to show for it now, but Grant tells us of an interesting link with the Victorian past: one of the women who set the clinic up was Margery Spring-Rice, niece of Millicent Fawcett.
This short work has much more to say about the later history of the area — which seems to have had even more than its share of scandals. It will therefore be of interest to anyone who likes exploring London and its forgotten past, Victorian or otherwise. Those who do explore it, whether on a screen or on foot, will find some further guidance at the end, in the list of sources that delve more deeply into the individual episodes of Ladbroke Grove's colourful past.
Bibliography
Grant, Joan. It's not Notting Hill, It's Ladbroke Grove. London: Joan Grant, 2025. Kindle. 68 pp. ASIN: B0DSLNXSBB. £6.99
Created 23 January 2025