Welcome to volume three of Socks House Meeting’s guest column dissecting the four quarters of London. Last month, Socks exposed the Aussie takeover of east London as they move on from their oft-assumed spiritual home of Clapham Common. This month, post-Carnival, they’re taking us west to ask: can Notting Hill ever really be “cool”?
If we’re judging it by the current London codes of “cool”: small plates, orange wine, listening bars, low lighting and enough stainless steel to furnish a commercial kitchen, Notting Hill should have a fighting chance.
But Notting Hill has always sat slightly apart from the rest of west London. It has the pillared townhouses and eye-watering property prices you’d expect from the postcode, but it’s also home to Carnival and the community that it celebrates, which automatically gives it a fair few more points on the cool scale.
Generations of Caribbean culture have given the area an identity entirely distinct from the aristocratic, curtain-twitching, Tesla-townhouse-trillionaire version of west London found further south. Portobello Market still throws up the occasional vintage gem, if you can bear the rummage, and admittedly, it has one of London’s more interesting food scenes.
Yes, tourists still queue to take photos outside the blue door from Hugh Grant’s Notting Hill, but scratch slightly beyond that version of the neighbourhood, and … it starts to feel a lot less traditionally “west” than the Sloane Rangers of the past and the supercar-driving, £2000-a-bottle-oud-scented west London of today.
Leave Portobello Road behind and head north towards Golborne Road, and things get a LOT more interesting. Golborne Road’s strongest argument for being cool is that, for the most part, it doesn’t seem particularly interested in proving that it is.
The stretch has long been home to a mix of cuisines and communities that existed well before small plates became shorthand for a £££ rent. There’s the Moroccan food van up the road where the go-to order is the fish with rice and tea; Maramia Cafe serving Palestinian food and regularly hosting birthdays and gatherings; and two Portuguese bakeries, of which the one with the BMW LI5BOA number plate does the better pastel de nata (it echoes the bagel feud in east so perfectly!). Across the road, Straker’s represents the newer guard, having rocked the Instagram chef/foodie world a few years ago with its MPW-coded mussel flatbreads, and other things …
And now Kiez: a London kebab shop that, its press release informs us, “nods to Berlin’s minimal techno scene”. If Keinemusik techno being played while you’re eating a kebab with an Aperol spritz doesn’t scream manufactured “esotericism”, then I’m not sure what does.
Here sits the middle of the Venn diagram that inches Notting Hill towards “cool”. Part of what gives its cool is its cohesion between the en vogue newer hang outs like the Fat Badger and Straker’s sitting alongside the foundational places like Maramia Cafe, the Portuguese bakeries and Moroccan food vans. Golborne Road feels less like west London trying to cosplay east, and more like the point where Notting Hill’s enduring character meets London’s newer codes of cool.
Then, there are the people. To borrow a phrase from a recent Substack, the “Golborne Road gremlins” – those who never seem to be at work but always have time to sit outside Golborne Deli staring over their Jimmy Fairlys at your Birkenstocks because they’re not the Rick Owens collabs.
Even the running club sirens have made it west, but it’s a different species. Less Victoria Park, Salomons, natty wine and boyfriend in an Arc’teryx beanie designing anthropomorphic graphics for an east London pizza slice joint. More Lululemon, Icelandic water bottle, sitting outside Daylesford Organic on a Monday afternoon discussing the weekend at Soho Farmhouse.
Then the pubs. First up The Cow – potentially the best pub in London? It has its moments. Very good people watching, very good oysters, and if it’s too busy you can always go across the road to The Westbourne and overhear a Swiss International School couple with Harley Street-engineered pores, laughing about how “Henri” or “Francisco” didn’t leave a tip at Sketch last night. Kind of like watching Triangle of Sadness in real time. You don’t want to be friends with them, but you can’t look away.
But maybe the question isn’t whether Notting Hill can ever really be cool, but whether the things we’ve decided make somewhere cool are even particularly cool anymore. Small plates, orange wine and carefully low-lit bars have spread so far beyond their east London mothership that finding a bottle of something cloudy in Earl’s Court no longer feels especially radical. And perhaps that’s where Notting Hill has the advantage. There was already an identity underneath all that chrome and the unbearable weight of small plates. Golborne Road didn’t suddenly become interesting when the natural wine arrived. The Moroccan cafes, Portuguese bakeries, Palestinian restaurants and generations of diaspora communities who live there had already done most of the heavy lifting.
Notting Hill has always sat slightly askew from the Barbour coat, brass scissor-door lift version of west London – the Sloanes and old-money characters occasionally peering out from behind the doors of Something Mansions.
Maybe that’s the point. West isn’t really trying to be anything that it isn’t – save perhaps for a listening bar just off the King’s Road, which feels confusing for everyone involved. Notting Hill doesn’t need to cosplay east London to give west its edge.
Without Golborne Road, Notting Hill might still be concreted in 2016 forever.
Honourable west London mentions:
• Edgware Road for dinner, specifically Kurdistan Caffee on Church Street Market. The chickpea off-the-bone meat soup with a koobideh, rice and salad all for under the price of two pints in any pub mentioned above.
● Bayswater/Queensway – the Queensway market is under threat of closure, so go there! Uzbek Corner has the nicest people on earth serving very nice food.
● Leinster Terrace Halepis Greek restaurant was one of Lady Diana’s favourites.
● Sol’s wine bar if you want small plates and natural wine, which personally feels very weird in west London but feels at home on that street.
