The Poetry Society

 

The paved way - called Via Strata - along

the high terrace of land north of the Thames

ninety five feet above sea level, became

the High Street, Notting Hill. And earlier than

the Romans, this road cutting through densely

wooded land had been an ancient trackway

chief route of the Celtic Trinobantes

crossing the whole country to Colchester

their capital. From Notting and Campden Hills

a beacon would have been visible to someone

on rising ground near Egham, south of the river.

 

A few yards north is now Ladbroke Square.

I like to think that one of the coverts, the brakes

of 'game, red and fallow deer, wild boars and bulls'

of Middlesex Forest, described by William Fitz-stephen

in eleven seventy, and Knotting Wood, between Shepherd's

Bush and the Gate, a dangerous stretch of road

for travellers, where William Lovell robbed

Thomas de Holland's cart, but later, in thirteen

sixty one or two, was pardoned by the King

of 'this and other outlawries, for good service

in the Wars of France, was here exactly.

 

The sole Roman relic in Kensington parish -

a trough of broken masonry, which might be

the sarcophagus of a coffin burial -

was unearthed while digging the foundations

through stiff yellow clay baked into bricks

for the first houses built around the clearing

to become the square. The same site yielded

some blackened pipes and stone cannon balls

left centuries later, perhaps from an ambush

of troops who hid in the scrubby undergrowth

during the Parliamentary struggles.

 

Now fast-forward to the nineteenth century:

too many names to mention - investors desperate

to choose the right partner, the right moment

to start construction. But booms and busts

ruined most, and what was planned as 'a whole

estate of gentlemen's residences' became

'a graveyard of buried hopes'. The Building News

in April eighteen sixty one could still describe

the slimy carcases of roofless buildings

fractured walls, crumbling masonry

and empty windows like black staring eyes.

 

By nineteen ten it all seemed fine: lawyers

East India merchants and baronet's widows

owned the houses, and Ladbroke 'upheld the proper

dignity of the English middle classes'.

But even before the second world war the district

was in decline. First every floor, then every

room, had different tenants. Discordant curtains

peeling facades, broken railings. A few

decades later, another change - the dialectic

of development. The houses glisten with

new paint and fittings. The rich are back again.