City observation 1 - Portobello Road and Colville Square

“Staedte bauen heisst mit dem Hausmaterial Raum gestalten”; “Building cities means forming architectural spaces using buildings as material”, quoted in Hebbert (1998) p.208.

 

THE IMMEDIATE NEIGHBOURHOOD: a number of interconnected residential and small-scale commercial streets in Notting Hill, West London, part of the Borough of Kensington & Chelsea (see map link). The route starts at the intersection of Talbot Road with Portobello Road and travels north east to arrive at Golborne Road.

https://maps.google.com.au/maps?hl=en&gs_rn=12&gs_ri=psy-ab&cp=15&gs_id=1o&xhr=t&q=talbot+road+w11&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&bvm=bv.45960087,d.dGI&biw=1600&bih=805&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl

 

THE APPROACH AND CONTEXT: by cliché London is a “city of many villages”. This is certainly not the case if by “village” a sense of isolation, social and economic stability or cultural uniformity is implied. The area to be observed is at the northern end of Notting Hill and is an urban area of exceptional diversity, dynamism and volatility. In its recent history it has been open to multiple intrusions from the wider city and, through immigration, from the rest of the world.

The notion of London as a collection of villages is both very old and very important: it touches on almost every significant aspect of life in the city – on its diversity of building types, its political and governmental organisations, its historical divisions of class and race, and perhaps its contradictory combinations of dynamism and conservatism, globalisation and local insularity, resilience and flexibility. It is also an old city in an old and relatively stable political culture, with many layers of historical meaning and associations. Therefore in order to comment meaningfully on any of its constituent villages, the micro level, it seems to me impossible not to start with at least some idea of how the village fits with the macro whole, with the evolution of the greater city through time, and therefore what significance the micro observations may have for the city as a whole. In particular with a city like London, you need to have a sense of “where did it come from?” before you can make sense of what it is now or where it may be going.

The literature on London is vast; but in order to help provide a framework for understanding the area I chose, and to see what relevance the area may have to some larger themes of London life, I will draw heavily on two books: “London” by Michael Hebbert, and “London: A Social History” by Roy Porter.

Hebbert ends his book with the sentence: “When writers write about London they return continually to the themes of house in street, small in large, new in old, the world in a village.” [p. 208]. He also refers to the efforts of government bureaucracies, at the cost of many millions of pounds paid to market researchers and image consultants, to come up with the following key-words to help create a London brand: “heritage, friendliness, diversity, accessibility and creativity”. These certainly apply well, but I can think of others that in my opinion are equally valid: pragmatism, resilience, flexibility, inequality, decentralisation, exploitation, suffering, restlessness and dynamism. I don’t think any two Londoners would come up with the same list.

Let’s start with Hebbert’s introductory framing of his subject: “For London is a legendarily difficult city to get to know. A dense, irregular street network extends over 600 square miles, joining a hundred or so local centres into a continuous built-up mass with 7 million residents [in 1998]. It is a messy map with few unifying features: no ring road (except for the … orbital M25 motorway), no axial boulevards, no consistent street grid, and no clearly defined ‘downtown’. Buckingham Palace has the grand approach route of The Mall but all other landmarks are tucked informally into the street plan.” [p.4] … “As the [medieval] City of London stayed within its walls, Westminster matured into a city in its own right. The two cities formed a compound nucleus around which metropolitan London grew in a polycentric, dispersed fashion, without unifying municipal government. Plurality of governance explains irregularity of topography … The contrast with Paris could not be more complete. … [In Paris] the French state worked from the heart of the medieval city, enlarging … and modernising its fabric to make the city a symbol of national unity and indivisibility, and cultural point d’équilibre for the world at large. The history of Paris is a history of absorption and incorporation into a progressively higher organic unity. London’s is a history of multiplications, not just of local governments but every aspect of metropolitan life. In music, art, sport, religion, local government, hospital provision, business, London sails as a flotilla with two, three or more flagships.” [p.7]

A key phrase of Hebbert’s is: “More by fortune than design.” This encapsulates the tension that has existed for hundreds of years between the centralising and decentralising, centripetal and centrifugal forces in the city; between the impulse to impose a centralised plan on the city and the stubborn local loyalties of the city’s 33 boroughs; between the desire to limit and control the expansion of the city and the economic impetus to expand into the surrounding countryside; and between the visions of imposing a uniform and coherent architectural and design theme (in particular a modernist vision) and the patchwork, mishmash reality of many and varied building styles.

So we have a city which has been very large for a long time, a global city a century and a half before the term was adopted by academics, and one that expanded uncontrolled by a single central authority, architectural vision or administrative plan. “London [between 1800 and 1900] was the super-city de luxe. Driven by market forces, it ‘just growed’, without central command. A patchwork of dozens of autonomous districts, unevenly governed by often unrepresentative vestries, the metropolis sprawled on. It suffered from its administrative fault lines; but it also benefited, for confusion permitted diversity and interstitial growth. It became difficult to envisage the whole. The journalist Henry Mayhew tried gazing down from a balloon, but even then it was impossible ‘to tell where the monster city began or ended, for the buildings stretched not only to the horizon on either side, but far away into the distance … where the town seemed to blend into the sky’. ‘This vast bricken mass of churches and hospitals, banks and prisons, palaces and workhouses, docks and refuges for the destitute, parks and squares, and courts and alleys, which make up London’ thrilled and horrified him all at once.” [Porter, p.186]

 

WEST LONDON: historic Notting Hill was part of the great migration of the newly wealthy bourgeoisie of London (industrialists, traders, professionals and Empire-builders) out into the undeveloped market garden farmland of west London during the reign of Queen Victoria, about 1820-1900. Areas such as Hyde Park, Belgravia, South Kensington, Holland Park, Bayswater and Paddington were built by speculators to meet the demand of the demand to escape, literally up-wind (the prevailing winds are from west to east), the squalor, disease, smoke, stench and overcrowding of the rapidly industrialising parts of London. Like virtually all previous developments, the expansion of west London took place through the division of land owned by the great estates of the feudal landowning class. The building of the new estates on land held by single landowners was therefore a series of planned developments: the landowners were keen to retain control of the design, architecture, quality and ambience of the new estates; this fact and the relatively short time in which the area was built accounts for the striking uniformity of building type, decoration, street width, quality and layout. This was “planning”, but planning by the private sector on a grand scale. The landowners worked with and through professional builders: for example “the Marquess of Westminster, and his builder, Thomas Cubitt, who between them were jointly responsible for Belgravia and … Pimlico. Cubitt was the age’s greatest builder … [whereas previous builders] had subcontracted work to specialist craftsmen, Cubitt gathered the entire business under his belt, organising the first large-scale building firm, with some 2,000 employees, and hiring all craftsmen from plumbers to painters.” [Porter, p.210].

The basic style of building was however much older – going back to the development of Bloomsbury Square in the 1660s. It is worth looking a little at this because it lies at the heart of so much of London’s architecture and organisation. “Bloomsbury Square launched a new town-house style destined to dominate London: the narrow-fronted terrace. Each dwelling had a simple rectangular plan, rising to four stories [plus a kitchen-basement], constructed in brick with thick dividing walls to curb fire risks … The front door was imposing, with a semicircular arch. The sash windows were tallest on the first floor, smallest on the top. Vertical living was a novelty … Terraces were often boxed into squares, the central area compensating for the fact that the residences had little land of their own. [The Earl of Southampton] realised that dwellings alone were not enough: a square had to form the focus of an eligible residential unit, a kind of village, comprising a grid of more modest streets, shops and services and creating a living-unit with a cachet of its own.” [Porter p.104]. Culturally, the formality, coherence, and uniformity of design and quality of the terrace and the square enabled the new professional and merchant rich to emulate, in a way, the grand mansions of the landed aristocracy by combining their resources. The style also drew on the other successful merchant-based republics of the era such as Amsterdam.

Just as important was the economic innovation underpinning the new pattern of urban development: “Southampton parcelled out plots to builders on forty-two-year leases at low ground rents, on condition that the lessee built substantial houses which would ultimately become the ground landlord’s property. For the landlord, this minimised outlay while guaranteeing quality control and a regular income … The builder was thus an entrepreneur, borrowing money, shouldering risks, raking in profits. The building-lease system met London’s needs to a T. The landlord got his estate developed without tying up capital … [and] the speculative builder acquired a prime site.” [Porter, p.103].

A final key element was the role of the state in planning. Legislation in the 1770s (such as the London Building Act of 1774) mandated building rules, materials and general structural forms for buildings of two to four stories, as well as street and pavement widths. These rules therefore imposed style and quality standardisation on an existing building format, and thereby retained a strong sense of what the planners thought the urban landscape should look like.

NOTTING HILL: anyone who wants a basic visual impression of modern Notting Hill should watch the Hugh Grant-Julia Roberts film. However, its lack of connection to reality can be seen in the fact that the film is entirely populated by white people – not a black face to be seen!

Notting Hill (the place not the movie) can be seen as a “zone of transition”: in terms of economic class, between the wealth of Kensington/Hyde Park (central London) to the south and the relative poverty of the public housing estates and working class row housing (outer London) to the north; ethnically and culturally between an overwhelmingly white majority in wealthy Kensington, a historic white (Anglo and Irish) working class towards the north, a large (and in the 1970s-80s “ghettoised”) African-Caribbean community, and many recent immigrant groups; and in terms of building format, from Victorian terraces and squares to council estates and ultra-Modernism (Golborne Road is overlooked by Trellick Tower, an iconic modernist building).

In following the streets from Portobello Road to Golborne Road I will try to address a number of these elements: the economic dynamic of the area, in particular the impact of Portobello Road market; the impact of major transport infrastructure in dividing the area, and asking whether there are opportunities as well as negatives; the variety of building formats, to ask whether there are any lessons that hold good for London and possibly other cities; and the volatile but rich ethnic and cultural heritage of the area, as well as the impact of gentrification.

Let’s start at the intersection of Portobello Road and Talbot Road:

Portobello Market is one of the major tourist attractions in London and is the overwhelmingly dominant economic feature of the immediate area. In brief, the main antiques market is held on Saturday, with a number of subsidiary markets (fruit and vegetables, fashion and “bric-a-brac”) both on Saturday and on fixed days during the week. On Saturdays many thousands of tourists walk along Portobello Road from its start close to Notting Hill Tube Station north towards Golborne Road. The business activity of the street itself (essentially an ordinary Victorian commercial street) therefore represents a dominant “primary use” in the neighbourhood. Significantly, the tourist factor dominates not just spatially but also in terms of time – the overwhelming majority of tourists visiting on Saturday. (The photo was taken on a week day).

Our focus is not on Portobello Market itself but on the significance of its impact on the residential streets within walking distance and on the some of the other commercial streets and activities in its immediate vicinity. However, it is useful to have a degree of understanding of how the market changes in use as it progresses north, as well as a sense of its role as a centre of gravity for the neighbourhood. In particular, the focus will be on the extent to which Jane Jacobs’ themes – multiplicity of choice, smallness and variety, the mutually reinforcing nature of diversity and range of primary and secondary uses – are applicable.

The businesses occupying the buildings along Portobello essentially follow a pattern – higher value and turnover to the south, declining as one moves northward along with the overall quality of the building stock and environment. Historically the core of the market was a network of “antiques” stores (in inverted commas because many sold reproductions) fairly close to the start of the road. These stores were usually build into cramped mini arcades in the buildings, giving the sense to tourists of serendipity and digging out obscure treasures, with almost all of the business being done on Saturdays, when stallholders would also sell antiques on the street. In recent years there has been a strong tendency for the antiques stores to be priced out of their traditional area and replaced by chain stores selling fashion, a process which many fear is undermining the character and distinctiveness of the street – note the ‘Jack Wills’ outlet in the photo. (There has to-date been no coordinated effort to relocate the antiques shops to the cheaper end of the street.) Portobello nevertheless provides a great array of facilities – coffee shops, bars and pubs, banks, speciality foods and delicatessens, a trendy cinema – and the people that are attracted to using them outside market days. In that respect it is a classic example of Jacobs’ insight that residents “possess more convenience, liveliness, variety and choice than [they] 'deserve' in [their] own right” [p.199] given the buying power at their disposal, and confirms the strong feedback loop effect as a greater variety and quality of business, initially attracted by and dependent on the weekend tourist traffic, in turn attracts many more people outside the busy weekend, thereby greatly extending the revenue-generating period for those businesses.

As one walks up Portobello the buildings are lower quality, the rents cheaper, the market increasingly devoted to fruit-and-vegetables and bric-a-brac, and the permanent businesses more workaday and devoted to local custom (local supermarket, laundry). But this area, broadly where the road passes under the “tube line” and the Westway motorway, is in many ways the most dynamic and interesting, definitely younger, and dominated increasingly by fashion (both new and recycled) and music. We will get back to it later.

Moving along, here are shots of Colville Square, about 50m up Talbot Road:

 

This is one of the “classic” London urban formats we saw above, the narrow terraced mansion arranged in a square facing a garden, built as part of the speculative construction boom in the late 1800s. At 5-6 stories plus a basement and built on a high proportion of the individual lot, they are relatively high density and have a high (but consistent) FAR. In my view it is a wonderful urban format for a number of reasons. First, the buildings give a sense of formality, coherence, solidity and quality, with high ceilings and large windows (in particular on the lower floors) giving light and a sense of expansiveness. The consistency of the rows is established by the uniform setback, but individuality and visual interest is enhanced by minor differences in decoration and in the variety of colour in which the stucco facades are painted.

Second, the greenery of the garden provides a crucial counterpoint to the uniformity of the building facades, and softens their impact. This garden is public, unlike many in West Kensington which are accessible only to residents of the square.

Third, and in my opinion the most significant reason, is the resilience of the housing stock both in physical and in social terms. By this I mean that, although they were built to house the new bourgeoisie of 19^th century London as single family terraced mansions with ample provision for servants, the housing units have proven to be extremely flexible in terms of the types of households they house. Whereas they were originally built explicitly to segregate the wealthy from the slums of inner London, they functioned in the 1960s-70s as effectively ghetto housing, divided up into a multitude of often multi-occupant “bed-sits”, and are now essentially mixed-income housing. The key reason for this flexibility is that the stairwells are built in to the sides of each building, next to the party wall, which allows the house to be divided up in a number of ways – for example, a basement apartment, three stories of 1-2 bedroom apartments, and a larger two-story “maisonette” with a roof terrace, each having its own front door but sharing a stairwell and main door to the street.

Although in recent decades gentrification has pushed house prices beyond the reach of many local residents, much local property is still owned by non-profit “housing trusts” which provide subsidised accommodation to long-term residents. The tall terrace design, with its coherence, uniformity of design and quality, inherent flexibility, and access to a public garden, therefore provides an opportunity to avoid the whole concept of “low-income housing” which has at its core the promotion of income segregation and the concentration of the poor into distinctive and identifiable ghettos of low-quality housing. With a mix of owner-occupation and stable (and in some circumstances, subsidised) rental accommodation, a variety of income levels can be accommodated in one building, with the only trade-off for those with lower incomes being less space, rather than the multiple negatives of low construction quality, high concentration of poverty, poor amenities, isolation and social stigma associated with buildings that are conceived of as “low-income” housing stock (whether public or private). The starting point for redevelopment of poor-quality residential or marginal urban land in London should, in my view, not be the provision of “low-income housing” but rather the provision of high-quality and relatively high-density housing, which will at least maintain and quite likely increase in value over time as the neighbourhood matures, making it attractive to middle-class tenants and owners. The needs of low-income households can then be addressed by legislating to give tenants long-term security of tenure and by allocating a portion of the new housing stock to subsidised tenancy where subsidies are paid by the central State, philanthropic investors or ngo’s such as housing trusts.

London, as with most old cities, has a chronic shortage of housing as well as a lot very old, low quality and lower density housing stock. However it also has the advantage of possessing a number of very successful, adaptable, flexible and resilient housing formats – primarily the terraced house, the square and the “mansion block”. With good planning and legislation these formats should be straightforward to build with modern building techniques, even allowing a number of modernist “takes” on the original, and retaining high quality in material to reflect the traditional “feel” (brick or stucco facades).

The other key factor is the communal garden. The one in Colville Square is partially shaded but well-overlooked by multiple windows. Its layout is very formal, with large ornamental flowerbeds surrounding the garden and arranged in the centre to require visitors to stroll around rather than stride or run down the centre. It is an enclosed space with attractive railings on all four sides, with one gate at each that needs to be pushed open and which close behind on springs when released. The reason is that the central part of the garden is set aside as a playground for infants, toddlers and their parents, and the ambience therefore is very much orientated to visitors with small children or those who simply want to enjoy the sun (a rare treat sometimes) with a newspaper or coffee on one of the benches. On sunny days when a few people wander up from Portobello Road, tourists and youngsters happily share benches or, quite often, choose to sit instead on one of the stone curbs delineating the flower beds. The garden therefore provides an enclosed and protected environment with well-delineated “edges”, adequate seating, and a sense of ownership of a high-quality space to its users. Other squares in the neighbourhood provide necessary variety, being designed with older kids and teenagers in mind – more open, with basketball courts or more advanced play areas.