Portland Road The Secret History of Our Streets

London, in 1886,

then, the largest city in human history

and the centre of the known world.

With its self-importance, its dirt, its wealth and awful poverty,

it seems a mystery to us now.

It was a different world, an entirely different world.

But there is a guide to this human jungle.

Charles Booth, Victorian London's social explorer.

Booth produced a series of pioneering maps that colour-coded

the streets of his London,

according to the ever-shifting class of its residents.

Booth's maps are like scans, X-rays that reveal to us

the secret past beneath the skin of the present.

If people knew how many cattle was killed there,

I don't think they'd live there!

He wanted his maps to chart stories of momentous social change.

And those houses were the lowest of the low.

The ebb and flow between enormous wealth and terrible poverty.

How easily desirable or well-to-do neighbourhoods could descend

into the haunts of the vicious and semi-criminal, and back again.

Now the maps can help us reveal the changes

that have shaped all our lives,

and made the story of the streets the story of us all.

Oh, my goodness! The old toilet's gone.

So we're going back to one of the tens of thousands of streets

Booth mapped - Portland Road, Notting Hill.

Full of multimillion-pound houses,

it's the ultimate London banker street.

But it was once the worst slum in London.

Portland Road was a slum as far as other people was concerned.

As far as we were concerned, it's where we lived.

And, today, living on the same street,

some of the richest people in Britain,

and some of the poorest.

My village is that way. Their village is that way.

Houses on Portland Road don't come cheap.

In this one, you can practically grab both walls

with outstretched hands.

But it's on the market for just under £3 million.

A few doors down, this derelict shell went for 3.1 million.

And this extravagantly decorated house is up for five million.

I'm totally and utterly appalled.

It really makes working in other areas fairly pointless.

If you can buy the right property,

it's pretty pointless going out and doing anything else.

Well, it's a financial ghetto.

If you want to live in a ghetto,

then there's a limited number of houses that you can live in,

and this is inside the ghetto.

Portland Road was built in the 1850s,

in the middle of the most frantic housing boom in London's history.

Its houses were put up by speculative developers,

on a strip of wasteland between the grand new Ladbroke Estate,

which became Notting Hill,

and the much more down-market Norland Estate,

home to the Piggeries and Potteries, London's most squalid Gypsy camp.

Almost everyone rented rather than bought,

and Portland's developers built grand houses to attract

the same posh tenants who were moving into the Ladbroke Estate.

At the south end of Portland, the investment paid off.

Census returns from the 1860s show the houses being rented to

a surgeon, an art dealer and a fundholder.

Booth's map, made around 40 years after Portland was built.

At the south end of the street,

well-to-do and comfortable residents are living alongside each other.

But as you go further north, the class of resident drops dramatically.

The people living in this part of the street are poor.

The further north you went,

the closer you got to the Gypsies and stench of the piggeries.

And, up here, the hoped-for posh tenants had failed to materialise.

Investors left holding houses on north Portland found

that only the poorest wanted to move here,

families who couldn't afford more than a single room.

Houses built as big family homes slipped into multiple occupancy,

and a little slum was born.

When you look back, we lived in a shack. We lived terrible.

Portland Road was a slum, as far as other people was concerned.

As far as we were concerned, it's where we lived.

We had my mum and dad and six of us kids living in the ground floor,

which was only two rooms.

We had two people live on the floor above us,

and at the top of the house,

we had an old soldier from the First World War.

And we all shared that same toilet.

No bathroom. Tin bath. You fetched it in, put it in front of the fire.

The rent was about 12/6 a week, for each family.

12/6, by the way, is 65 pence in today's money.

They weren't getting £2 rent a week from the house,

so they done no repairs, they done nothing.

157 Portland Road - look at that house now.

Should have seen it when I lived there.

It was a tip, but it was lovely.

My dad was offered to buy that house for £300.

157 - £300.

My dad had never seen £300 in his life.

This is the bit of Portland Road I lived in.

157 - we lived there.

This is where my grandad lived.

My nan and grandad lived in the middle.

My uncle there, uncle Fred lived there.

My aunt Joan lived right at the very top.

My grandad was a rag-and-bone man,

and he used to have a barrow outside here.

On a Saturday, he'd have all the old clothes, jerseys, shoes,

and you could buy a pair of shoes for sixpence.

And nobody wore underwear. No boys wore underwear.

WOMAN LAUGHS Nobody had pants and vests.

-Why not?

-You couldn't afford it! Pants and vests?! You're joking.

-You never had pants and vests.

-You're kidding.

-I'm not kidding.

We never had pants and vests.

The girls, the girls had knickers and things like that.

The girls are different, you know. They had to have them.

But the boys - long trousers or trousers.

What do you want pants underneath for? You can save ten bob. You know?

EVERYBODY LAUGHS

-Do you remember your first pair of pants?

-Yeah.

Well, no, I don't remember 'em. I don't remember 'em,

but I think I got 'em from the Red Cross or something.

WOMAN LAUGHS EVEN LOUDER

I got 'em from the Red Cross. My mum used to go begging, you know.

Would you say you were working-class people?

-Is that what you called yourselves?

-Yeah. Lower-working class.

But it didn't worry me. It didn't...

Cos there were lots of people like me. There was lots low like me.

See, my dad couldn't read or write, nor could his brother,

because they never went to school after the age of ten.

George's street had fallen dramatically downhill

since Booth's time.

Just a few years before George was born,

one of Booth's researchers came back to Portland Road

to update the original survey.

The south end was now occupied entirely by skilled workers.

The well-to-do residents from Booth's time had all fled.

And at the north end,

the road was being dragged further down

by a new group settling on the street.

My other grandad used to live third door from the end,

with my gran.

They were Gypsies, both full-blooded Gypsies. That was my mum's family.

The north end of Portland Road in about 1935,

just a few yards from George's great-grandad's house.

There's an abandoned brewery at the end of the street

and tenement houses built for brewery workers.

Gypsies and other families from the slum,

a few streets to the west, are migrating to this north end.

The slum-dwellers are dragging the street further down

and the 1929 study has a new label for this black end of Portland,

degraded and semi-criminal.

The slum conditions in some Notting Hill streets

had been a national disgrace for 100 years.

And by the '30s, the housing trust movement

had begun to rehouse the district's most destitute.

On Portland's north end, both the brewery,

and many of the tenement houses, are about to be demolished,

to make way for Portland Road's first social housing block,

Nottingwood House.

Nottingwood is followed by Winterbourne House a few feet away.

The blocks are to provide a new life

for the people of the Notting Hill slum.

This scene from the film Turn The Key Softly

shows the north end of Portland in a state of transition.

The nearly new Winterbourne House is on the left.

On the right, some of the old tenement houses are still standing.

In the distance, on the site of the old brewery, is Nottingwood House.

This is Nottingwood flats, the Nottingwood House.

This is where we all got moved to.

I was on the second balcony.

The Reeveses lived up the top there.

Then you had Georgie Price and his family.

Then you had the Townsalls next door to me,

the Kirbys at this end and that was our little group.

The only trouble with this place was it was built on a brewery,

and we had a lot of trouble with cockroaches.

I used to wake up in the morning with 'em caked all down me leg.

We used to have races with them, us kids, down the passageway,

and see who could get further.

And we'd cook 'em, watch 'em pop! It was a big slum, yeah.

So, now, do you know much about Nottingwood House today,

the kind of people that live there or anything?

No. I heard it was mostly Moroccans and, um, ethnic majorities, I think.

I thought it all got nobby, but it hasn't.

-What was on this side?

-Old houses.

There was houses there.

In Turn The Key Softly, an unlikely convict is released from prison

and returns to her room on Portland Road.

-Oh, it's you.

-I did write. Please can I have me old room back?

Well...some people would say I was a fool to have you back.

I never took anything from 'ere.

Well, you better come on in.

Well, I'm taking you back on one condition, see?

That you keep out of trouble.

To the film's audience, Portland would have seemed like an obvious

location for a film about an impoverished semi-criminal street.

And as the country went to war,

Notting Hill's squalid reputation was spreading internationally.

'Germany calling, Germany calling.'

Lord Haw-Haw, who was a propagandist for Germany,

used to give out messages.

'The British Ministry of misinformation has

'been conducting a systematic campaign

'of frightening British women and girls...'

And he did say, "Germany calling, Germany calling.

"We're coming over to Notting Hill tonight because we're going to

"bomb you and we're going to get rid of all the rats and the bugs."

And, sure enough, it got bombed.

That was one of our best playgrounds cos that was bombed.

-That was an 'ouse.

-This was a bomb site?

-Yeah.

Yeah, this was the bomb site.

We all hung out together, sort of thing, you know.

We used to have our fights over the bombed end.

This lot, we would meet over at the bomb debris.

We had our little camp, they had their little camp,

and we'd throw bricks at each other with dustbin lids to, you know.

I remember cutting Georgie Price's head open with a brick.

We was young tearaways, you know.

We'd stand in sixes and eights,

talking and nagging, and making a hell of a noise.

When I was 17, we had the teddy boy era, you know.

You'd find a caff and you'd all congregate there.

And then all of a sudden the door would open up and say,

"You boys from Notting Hill, you're going to get a fight.

"We're coming from Paddington." And in would rush about ten, 15 boys.

And there'd be an almighty fight,

all the tables and chairs would go over, blah blah blah,

and then they'd leave as quick as they came.

You know. Some of the time you got a whacking, some you didn't.

-That's got to be scary.

-Course it was scary.

-Do you belong to a gang?

-Well, we did.

What happened to it?

Some of them went down and the rest are still out. About five left now.

When you say "went down", you mean they went up?

Well, the Scrubs ain't up, is it?

And what does your gang do, or what did it do?

Anyone. LAUGHTER

With the rise of the teds,

Notting Hill was cementing its century-old reputation as a pit of unruliness.

It was the last place any prudent Londoner would visit by choice.

Which is why no-one could ever have expected what was about to happen.

We were, I should think, the second or third of the settlers.

We were living in Chelsea,

too many children in a tiny house,

and we were desperately wanting to find a bigger house,

and we wandered down here and we thought it was quite a good place, Portland Road,

because you come off Holland Park Avenue,

which has always been fairly pleasant,

and then go into grot-land, which it was in those days.

We sort of took a chance that it was going to go up,

because they were all in multiple occupation, virtually.

My mother wasn't too pleased.

She couldn't understand why we wanted to leave Chelsea,

where we had a house, which was dinky-sized,

but nonetheless Chelsea,

and come here in the wilds of W11.

-She couldn't imagine it but I'm glad...

-What did she say?

Oh, she said, "Well, you can't possibly live there, darling."

Tim and Penny Hicks had moved into 157 Portland Road,

George's old house.

They were among the first of a new wave of settlers

who were to change Portland Road for ever,

the vanguard of a revolution

that had been set in motion a few years earlier.

'Rent control was abolished for accommodation let after 1957.'

In 1957, the Rent Act had swept away rent controls,

enabling private landlords to charge whatever rent they liked.

Portland Road's houses, which,

for 100 years had been practically worthless,

suddenly became cash cows.

'The new de-controlled rents were soon three times as high

'as the controlled rents.'

But those who rented before the Act were

still protected by the old rent controls,

so the only way for the landlords to cash in

was to get the sitting tenants out.

For landlords like Peter Rachman, who owned a house on Portland,

it was a cash incentive to drive the original working-class residents out.

'Unwanted tenants would be encouraged to go,

'property decayed round them,

'and by the sort of intimidation that became notorious through Rachman.'

A man bought the house and came on the Friday evening to say

he'd bought the house and would take it over the next morning.

And I told him it was controlled before he bought it,

but he said he'd got other people out of houses and he'd get us out.

He knocked the garden wall down and threw it all over the garden

and it looked like a bomb site.

He said if we did anything to the wall, or my brothers did,

he would beat us up or shoot us.

'This house has recently been sold

'and will shortly be converted into luxury flats.

'The last controlled tenant is still there, moved down to the basement.'

Mrs Jones, why did you move down to this basement?

Pardon?

Because she ordered me, you know.

-Was that the house agent?

-Yes.

I had to come down here or go out.

-See?

-Did you want to move down?

Well, it ain't cos I wanted. I had to. See?

Or go out in the street.

We highlighted the handsome wood floor by sanding it and sealing it

and just threw rugs on it like this one.

'The face of the borough is being changed by a new

'kind of resident, the middle-class invasion.'

'As more and more people moved in, prices began to rocket.'

-So you bought your house in 1968, is that right?

-Yeah. Yes.

-Was it '68? Yes.

-Do you mind me asking how much you paid?

-11,750.

'But even at prices like this, the houses were as attractive,

'once renovated, as any in Hampstead and two thirds the price.'

They've got the sale board up there.

That's the house.

That was 1960-odd.

I think it's October 1960.

5,550.

The place was absolutely a dump.

We were really the first people in who started to posh the place up.

I think my parents were a little bit concerned about it.

My father said, "If you want to go and live in a slum,

"go and live in a slum, if that's what you want to do!"

What did the local school say when we took one of our first children to the local school?

Oh, yes, the local primary school.

One of the teachers, when we were being shown round,

one of the teachers said to me,

"You do appreciate, Mrs Hicks, that this is not working class?

"This is criminal class."

Punishment books from St Clement's School in the '40s and '50s

seemed to confirm the teacher's alarming description.

"Robert - disgusting behaviour and foul talk to woman bath attendant."

"4 on the hands."

"William - urinating on another boy. 1 on each hand."

"Group of nine boys - disgusting language and conduct to the wife of the school keeper."

Punishment not recorded.

This was the school where you were thinking of putting your son?

Well, he went there. It was the local primary school.

-So he was educated at a school for the criminal classes?

-Yes.

He got to Westminster in the end.

Oh, shush! That spoils it.

So when these posh people first started moving in,

did you treat the kids all right?

They didn't mix with us. Nah, didn't mix with us.

They didn't come out.

God, it sounds awful, you can't say these sort of things today,

but, you know, they liked to sit on their doorstep,

with their children wearing nothing but vests,

running up and down, you know.

Well, you know, that's not the way you live your life.

The pub was still a lovely old pub

and we could see the people,

a lot of heads bobbing up and down.

My daughter was absolutely enthralled after asking me.

She said, "Who's that singing Knees Up Mother Brown?"

Well, of course, they're loving it, you see.

There always used to be some sort of trouble outside at night.

There was always some shouting when they came out drunk.

GEORGE: Many a time, my mum found drunks sleeping in our passage.

I'd go and shout at them to get up and kick them out in the mornings.

They'd come from the Portland, halfway home, and they fancied...

Then they fell down in our passage.

It was tough.

Well, there was a brothel.

SHE CHUCKLES

Opposite.

We had some friends who lived with us in a parallel street in Chelsea

-and they bought, literally, bought the house next door.

-That side.

So he did up the house himself and, one day,

he was sort of looking at his house and admiring it,

and the paintwork he'd just done, having a cigarette.

And this lady from the brothel came out and said, "Can I help you, dear?"

He beat a retreat.

He couldn't believe there was a brothel next door to him!

-Oh, we had lots of totters. We had dear George.

-George and Dolly.

-They were fantastic.

-They lived opposite.

'The newcomers are not hostile to the working class,

'often quite the reverse, but the housing shortage makes them

'compete for the same homes and the middle class generally win.'

Of course, property developers started to move in opposite.

There was one guy who bought four of these houses opposite...

And sold for, presumably, a fortune.

-And bribed old George and Dolly out.

-Yes.

They moved on. I don't know whether they were pushed out. They moved on.

A lot of them got council flats.

If you moved out of one of those dumps and got a council flat,

you got a bathroom.

You got hot water. You got central heating.

Can you imagine that, after living in a dump like that?

You know, they couldn't wait to move, some of them.

Not because they didn't like the area, they didn't like the people,

it's just that they were bettering themselves.

They were coming up a step. They were getting a council house.

One's so much better than the other one.

This was old decrepit houses

and moved into a luxury brand-new flat, with all mod cons.

You can't compare them.

We had to get out because they were going to rehouse my mum,

but they wouldn't rehouse me and Jean.

And that was the end of us in Portland Road.

Everybody went their own way, from Portland Road.

My brother moved out.

My sisters just went and we just drifted apart over the years

and never got back together.

The dispersal of working people from Portland Road

meant the demise of a hundred-year-old community.

The south and middle sections of the street were finally being

occupied by the class for whom they were intended,

and ordinary people would never come back.

But there was one part of Portland that,

in the face of unimaginable social change,

was destined to cling to its impoverished roots.

Here, at the north end, in the blocks built to rehouse

the slum-dwellers in the '30s, there were to be no gentrifiers.

Housing trust flats were not for sale,

and Nottingwood and Winterbourne were too new and small to attract middle-class restorers.

And so the original working class stayed put,

a vestige of a disappearing culture,

and watched on as the south end of the street was transformed.

Well, right down the bottom there, we used to call that the Nob End.

-The Nob End?

-Yeah, the nobs, all the, you know, the flash people.

And if we went down there in gangs of us,

they used to shoo us away, you know. "Bugger off."

I better not say this but we used to go down there

and get our revenge by smashing windows and things.

Well, there was a pub on the corner there we used to go to.

And after that it was all sort of, you know...

-..nobs. It was still... It was when they started coming in.

-Who?

The yuppies, buying the properties up cheap.

They'd come out and go, "Go away."

We'd say, "Piss off!"

Then they call the police, then they take us home,

then I'd get a clip round the earhole from my mum.

Well, more than a clip.

The slum area was sort of that end, all the way down.

It's like the borderline.

Just cuts off there, doesn't it?

Start getting posher and posher and posher.

It was them and us, you know what I mean?

They left us alone, we left them alone.

The divisions between the different parts of the street were becoming starker.

In 1975, the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea built a traffic barrier,

dividing the mid and southern sections of the road.

It was a decision that surprised residents, reinforcing, as it did,

the hundred-year-old social division between the two parts of the street.

But it was a help to Julie's,

a wine bar just opening on the site of an old builders' yard.

Well, it was known as East Berlin and West Berlin.

This was East Berlin at the barrier of Julie's.

There was now a physical boundary between the midsection

of Portland and the grander, posher southern end.

And, for those at the south end,

there was a deeper sense of security,

cut-off from the estate culture of north Portland.

It was gentrifying more rapidly.

I've walked and cycled around this area which I loved,

and I saw a little notice up, and I went to see it with the estate agent.

And I never gave the key back!

We moved in early '77.

£18,000, which was a hell of a lot of money.

It was absolutely wonderful.

This room was completely with lino, and a bed in it.

And this was partitioned. It was another room.

All the woodwork was covered up with plasterboard

so you didn't have the original doors and everything.

But it was still an incredibly relaxed, Bohemian, crazy,

fabulous, uh, different street.

The settlers had built a middle-class enclave

in working-class Notting Hill, with Julie's as its social club.

So we're here to celebrate 40 years of Julie's.

I'm the next-door neighbour.

But it must've been a strange place to have

a posh restaurant in those days.

It was very much frontier land.

Behind me was Gypsy land.

A female friend of mine, she said, "If a man brought you here,

"you kind of knew where it was going to end up."

Did you get any kind of hostility from the local community

when you first arrived?

They were very puzzled by this sort of strange invasion

of fashionable people that seemed to come in here.

Have you seen changes to it, over the years?

Oh, yeah, the whole place has changed completely.

I've been here about 30 years

and obviously 30 years ago it wasn't gentrified.

-You know what the engine behind that change has been?

-Money.

Portland Road was becoming fashionable.

House prices were rising steeply.

And some serious money was moving in.

My mother's family really helped found the modern banking system in this country.

They also teamed up with the Rothschild family

and became a very, very powerful financial institution.

Part of that is now Barclays Bank today.

My great-great-great-great- grandfather Samuel Gurney,

he earned about £4 million during the 1840s.

He would have been one of the world's top financiers at that time.

That business then became Barclays Bank.

-Did that help pay for this house?

-Yeah, of course it did.

It helped pay for everything I am, everything I do.

As a consultant, I've worked for some banks

but I haven't been involved in the family's bank and, in fact,

a couple of years ago, I sold the last of my Barclays shares,

partly to invest in this property.

But you probably paid quite a lot of money for this house, right?

Well, it adds up, doesn't it? Everything adds up.

You could have maybe got a much nicer house in another part of town for a similar price.

-Exactly. Yeah.

-What did you do that for?

I didn't. My wife forced me into it.

My wife thought that this house in this area was a good investment

since property is THE British investment.

She wasn't going to let sentiment stand in the way of a good deal.

The old Bohemian atmosphere was fading.

A new kind of buyer was arriving on Portland

and houses here were becoming spectacular investments.

'House prices are soaring at their fastest rate

'since the boom of the '80s.'

'House prices in London are likely to be pushed even higher.'

'16% over the last year.

'The spending spree is being fuelled by huge City bonuses.'

'500 people earn bonuses of a million pounds or more.'

There's an awesome wall of money about to hit the top end of the London market.

Still looking up to two million? And you need some staff accommodation?

'Huge city pay packets push house prices through the roof.'

It changed a lot.

There used to be a mix of people but most of them have cashed in now,

so it's just factory workers now, bankers and their molls.

If LS Lowry was painting today, he'd be painting this area,

not Manchester, because this area is the dormitory for

the biggest factory in this country - the factory of finance.

And Hugh Grant would be making his programme,

his film Notting Hill, in Hackney.

He's moved on. It's all sloped shoulders, factory workers,

getting up at six o'clock in the morning.

The guy next door gets up at 4.30 in the morning,

his taxi arrives at 5.15, every flipping morning,

with its engine running outside.

And then he comes home, sloped shoulders, slop, slop, slop,

back from the Tube, slam the telly on, that's it.

They get paid very, very well,

but it's really, really, really expensive for them

to buy private education in London, the chauffeurs, just everything.

Paying for the gear for the missus.

It adds up. It's not cheap.

It costs millions of pounds to be a top banker.

It's very, very expensive.

The arrival of the bankers on Portland,

and the house price boom they brought with them,

left some of the earlier settlers sitting on top of astonishing capital gains.

There's one notorious - what do you call? - estate agent.

I could not leave my house at one point without him saying,

"You know how much you could get now?"

And, one day, I metaphorically slapped him and said,

"If you once more address me, I will take you to the police."

-It was appalling, his aggression.

-And what's it worth today?

Disgusting amount of money. It's, it's horrible. I don't even want it.

I wish it was the same amount.

It's, it's terrible that the housing market has gone

so completely ridiculous.

I don't need to tell you what this is worth.

You know what it is worth and it is appalling.

I honestly don't know.

-Two million, three million?

-More.

More than three million?

Yeah.

It's ugly. Because, for some people, that is nothing.

Everyone said, "But what's the trouble?

"You're sitting on a gold mine." But what would I want?

I would like this home, if I had a lot of money.

A home like this.

Portland's character was changing once again.

The old Portland Arms was given a face-lift,

transformed into a high-end beauty spa, the Cowshed.

That was Hope's, the dairy.

Right over the road from there was an oil shop.

Next door was Eric's, the sweet shop.

Cross over, it was Estee's. That was Eric's wife.

Next to him was Jones' the dairy.

That was dairy again.

You're at 129 Portland Road, which,

30 years ago, was a dairy.

We now sell works in excess of a million quid.

There are the uber-rich.

The designer will be sent in to look for specific works of art,

to go with the design for their drawing room or their dining room,

or their kitchen area.

So some of your clients wouldn't even see the piece before they bought it?

I have a sneaking suspicion that is the case, yes.

Even at these hard times now, people are prepared to spend money

because it's a one-off, it's an original.

It's something that will not date and it's going to last for years.

And that is what we try and do...

How much would that set me back, if that's not a rude question?

-It's very rude.

-Sorry.

Let me have a look. Erm, I don't even know. Isn't that terrible?

OK, that's £420.

We work with a lovely woman called Shirley McLauchlan who knits.

People can order these and put the child's name and the date of birth.

Well, you know I'm going to ask how much that one is.

I know. This is hideous. Hold on.

That's £870.

-Let's go and find some cheap things.

-OK, yeah.

Every single petal is cut out by hand.

-You're hiding the price tag!

-I know I am.

This is really stunning and...

OK, you can tell me the price of that one.

-No, I'm not going to tell you the price.

-Why not?

-And then...

So we're trying to pioneer younger designers now.

I'm wearing two today so you can layer them.

-Are we allowed to know how much that one is?

-Yes. They're about £200.

-That's reasonable.

-It is reasonable, but that's the whole thing.

We've got expensive things but we've got things that aren't so expensive.

There's ten to 15 shops and nowhere sells a paper.

Nowhere sells a cigarette. Nowhere sells a pint of milk.

You can't get a pound of potatoes.

Not one of these shops!

And there's 16 shops here. They're all... What are they?

Who are these shops for? There ain't no customers in 'em.

Before the '80s recession, the houses, like, trebled

and then a lot of people sold then.

And then came the '80s recession.

And then the lucky ones who couldn't sell hung on for two years and the houses doubled again.

People kept on saying,

"Well, the property bubble's going to burst, blah blah blah."

And in Notting Hill Gate, the property bubble went on bubbling.

I mean, it's really horrific.

I mean, not for us.

THEY ALL LAUGH

Basically, yeah, we're cashing in.

You look at it from the outside and it's the only house

on the street that hasn't been, like, totally done up.

Well, I don't think Chards could have put on their details,

"immaculately decorated". It's not falling to pieces.

It's an old house, which has been well lived in.

We had people coming and offering us really stupid money,

saying they'd need to spend £500,000 redecorating

and remodelling the house which I found very insulting.

So they certainly weren't going to be allowed to buy it.

I think if you go around somebody's house, you should respect them

because it's their gaff, and we had quite a few monsters coming round

the house who I wouldn't have sold to even if they'd offered us the price.

I think they're bullies and they make me really angry.

The new people who've arrived don't seem to want to know anybody.

And all the really smart houses that are now well in to ten, 12 million,

you know, every single one has a blind.

The whole area seems to be becoming a gated community.

But that's why this area's changed. It's greed. It's nothing else.

What are these?

Oh, well, I'm moving out

so these pictures are just being got ready to go in the van,

and shift them on. I'd like to find somewhere to put them.

Like all the trendy areas of London,

it's just lived in by investment bankers now,

so it just becomes very, very boring.

I mean, you don't know how boring it is until you actually experience it.

It is amazing to see how one industry has completely

dominated the best housing in this city.

Property prices have never been higher for banker properties.

Since the taxpayer got involved in helping bankers out, the prices of these houses have rocketed.

Where do you think that taxpayer money went? Into bankers' housing.

Do you think they're lending to small business? That's not how it works.

This house appeals to international bankers

and businesspeople who want to come to London

because London is a tax haven for them,

so these houses are particularly valuable.

I don't want to boast, but it's now worth several million pounds.

-Several million?

-Well, I say several million. Just under £3 million.

It's quite a small house, isn't it?

It's a tiny house, it doesn't have any foundations,

but it's a tax haven.

You come and live here on Portland Road

and you don't have to pay tax in Russia or wherever.

'It's a £3 million penthouse right in the heart of London

'but the estate agent and the couple she's showing round

'aren't speaking English.'

SPEAKS FOREIGN LANGUAGE

'So, why have this couple chosen London?'

INTERPRETER: It's the culture, the history and the people.

INTERPRETER: Yes, I agree with my wife.

The time's come to move out to a trendier place.

I want to live somewhere more artistic

and just generally have a different lifestyle.

I work in finance. I've always worked in finance.

And I was in finance, up until we had our first child

and then I moved into fashion.

-Nico's just given a quick tidy-up, as you can see.

-This is our bedroom.

-Nice bath.

-Yeah, we like a good bath, don't we, Nico?

I wanted a bath that at least two people could fit in,

and you can imagine how many times we've used the two shower heads.

-Oh, yeah.

-I think maybe once.

So you have a double bath and a double shower.

-Here's Vera, our nanny from Brazil.

-Hiding in the corner there.

Hide in the other corner!

-Tits out.

-Yeah.

This is where you can see the whole length of Portland Road and this

little park called Avondale Park,

which has been here for 200 years, I guess.

So how do you like living on this road?

We don't want to leave it, actually. Maybe get a slightly bigger house.

What do you need a bigger house for? It's massive.

We'd like a garden but aside from that it's perfect.

We were thinking, actually, of buying Avondale Park

but don't tell the council yet.

It's actually not a joke. We were thinking of... Cut!

You know the Hicks, don't you?

We know Emily which is... I think Emily is in...

So you're in, like, the Bohemian section, aren't you?

I think I am, yeah. I like that.

Yeah, we're the Bohemian part of Portland Road, yeah, the dodgy end.

SHE LAUGHS

The road's split into three so I think the first part of Portland Road,

the houses are much grander, they're bigger.

The second part of Portland Road, they're slightly smaller.

And then the third part of Portland Road, it's just totally different.

But would you quite like to move a bit further down this way?

I want to move only for the sole reason that I want more space.

I want a garden.

To move towards this end is a pretty big financial commitment, isn't it?

Yeah. I'd say it's double the financial commitment.

They go between four and five.

That seems to be the value on this side of Portland Road, yeah.

And then in the edgy part that you live in...?

The "Bohemian" part - they're more between two and three.

Why do you think they're so expensive?

It's, um, it's much, um, it's much further away from

the council housing on this end of Portland Road,

and you can say what you like,

but there is a level of snobbery associated with that.

I feel really guilty to say this but I didn't even realise that

that was Portland Road cos I never go over there.

I just... II-I... Well, I have no reason to but, yeah,

it's only when we started filming that I started to look around

and I realised that there was a third part of Portland Road.

Portland Road's three divided sections are the direct result

of its history, which still, today,

continues to shape the street's property market.

Its southern end has always been the richest

because it was furthest away from the slum.

The average price of a house here today

is three and a half million pounds.

In the midsection, fear of the nearby Gypsy camp dragged down

house values from the beginning.

The average house price today is 2.1 million.

And the north end,

originally tenement housing for brewery workers,

locked into poverty by the building of social housing in the 1930s.

Today, the average price of a flat here is only 340,000.

For central London, a bargain.

Today, a deprivation map made by the Kensington and Chelsea Council

shows a dramatically divided road.

Some of the richest people in England

and, living on the same street, some of the poorest.

I never go past that line. There'd be no reason for me to do that.

It's not because I'm any more snobbish than anybody else.

We're all human beings. It's just that I have no...

There is nothing at the end of that line that I have any involvement in.

It's just a few hundred yards. You can see it from here.

Why would you...?

Yeah, well, London's a series of villages and my village ends at that line.

My village is that way. Their village is that way.

It doesn't really matter where your block is.

If something's ugly, you just don't want to look at it, so you blank it.

We don't exist.

It can be very disconcerting when you can hear your neighbour peeing.

It's little things like that that chip away at your spirit.

It's dark, dingy, microscopic.

People have to walk by those very affluent houses every day,

which is a constant reminder of how poor they are.

There is that invisible line. It's like a force, an invisible force.

We're talking about just a few feet away.

For some reason,

the antisocial behaviour doesn't cross the invisible line.

It's just amazing how it works.

The other night, I saw two youths

and they had thrown something at a window on the corner there.

It was a Rolex watch.

They had mugged somebody

and chucked that evidence for some reason at that window.

And that was just on the border of the invisible line.

It's just weird how it works.

It's safe in principle but, as usual, in every part of the world,

you have to be careful.

-I think we both know that it's not that safe.

-Cos you've had...

Yeah, I got attacked, I got robbed, but...

It's not I think that...

It just can happen, I think.

I mean, that was a very upsetting moment. We'd just moved in.

It happened a few months after we'd moved in.

But I knew immediately they were trying to rob something

and I only had the watch so what do you do?

-I just gave the watch and they ran away.

-What did they do to you?

Nothing. They just... Whatever.

In the running, it just fell on the floor.

-Well, they put a gun to your head.

-Yeah, they put the gun on my head.

I mean, that was quite scary.

-That's OK.

-Well, it wasn't OK but...

It's OK. It can happen.

I mean, what happened to Nico was, was, pretty, pretty awful.

And it was very scary. I-I've become quite obsessive about checking

locked doors and checking the cars are locked and checking the kids.

You know, I check on the kids at least six times a night

before I go to sleep and I check the roof terrace is closed.

You know, I've become quite obsessive about it but, then,

we've heard some pretty scary stories.

Leaving his house on Portland Road in the hands of his estate agent,

Henry Mayhew has escaped to the country.

So how long has your family had this land here?

Well, I don't want to discuss any particular land,

if you don't mind, Joe, but we've been here for a long time, since...

-Generations?

-Well, we were certainly here in the medieval time.

So your family owns this wood. Or you own this wood?

No, nothing is owned by...

These kinds of assets aren't owned by people any more.

We've had 100 years of socialism.

Everything's owned by trusts and companies,

so you'll have to make inquiries.

You don't even know who owns this place?

It's owned by a trust, young man.

Yeah, so here's the cabin.

And it's the kind that's used on motorways.

I'm just going to be stripping it out over the next few weeks and months,

turning it into a really nice place.

I got sick of my life in Portland Road.

The thing is, the culture in Holland Park is very, very female because

the blokes are out making the money and the women are nattering along

about whether the elite schools the kids go to are good enough,

and whether, you know, the sports teacher's a lesbian or not.

Who cares?

The thing is, the only reason I lived there in the first place

was because my wife wanted to live there.

But that's why a lot of blokes are living there,

living a battery hen lifestyle.

They go out to work in the bank, they come back... I don't know.

It just doesn't appeal to me any more, that's for sure.

I had a need to show off and to be part of the gang.

I then found out it wasn't actually my gang.

There's more to life than the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

-Cos you haven't been back for a long time, right?

-Yeah.

-How long?

HE EXHALES

Well, I moved to Hornsey when I was 20,

then I met my wife now, Maggie.

Then we moved from St Charles Square to Heathrow,

and from Heathrow we went to Cornwall cos I lost the house.

I lost me job and I lost me house so I said to her,

"We might as well be skint in Cornwall than here,"

you know what I mean?

Because I was intending to retire to Cornwall when I was 65

but then I lost me job and that was it.

I had to sell the house cos I owed too much money,

bought myself a little mobile home for 30 grand, paid for, that's it.

That's where I am now.

At the bottom of a field in a mobile home.

-What's that like?

-It's lovely.

I mean, you know, it's lovely but I get nostalgic when I come home.

You know, because...I love it here, you know what I mean?

It's part of your... Well, it's your blood. It's in your blood, innit?

You know, I miss it.

I think Notting Hill's become nobbish.

Since Notting Hill the film, it's got worse.

Up the Goldwyn, you've got little artistic places, you know,

like, you know, art studios.

I mean, who wants them?

We used to say Notting Hill, you know. You come from Notting Hill.

That's what it's all about, Notting Hill, West 11.

If you say to someone, "Where do you come from?"

and they go, "Notting Hill,"

"Oooh, very posh."

You know what I mean? You got a nice house and things like that.

They go and buy the film.

No, mate!

Yeah, I miss all the old times there, I do.

I probably live in the past, that's what my problem is.

Living in memory lane.

You've got to think about this Portland Road, though.

That's their road now. It's not Portland Road.

It belongs to them now. They buy their own houses and shut you out.

I mean, my kids say, "Mum, you've got to go with the times."

I can't go with the times. I don't like it.

The past is here. I had a happy past.

I'm still staying back. I can't come forward.

When we moved out of 157, it was gutted.

The whole floorboards up, the lot, all went.

And suddenly, it was a lovely house.

And you think, "That's what it needed all the time."

But our landlords never had the money to do it,

we never had the money to do it. Somebody had money to do it.

And they could afford it. They don't do houses like that for nothing.

I'm glad we moved on. It's part of life, you move on.

We're happy now.

We'll finish our days here.

# I would rather not go back to the old house

# I would rather not go back... #

So did they turn into hooligans, your kids?

In their time, but they came out of it, like all children, you know.

The eldest was a banker before it became a dirty word.

Then the second one's a literary agent.

The third one is head of screen - what is it called? -

screen, television and radio at RADA.

And the youngest runs his own production company in New York and LA.

-So they've all come good.

-The banker's retired.

-The banker's retired, yes.

-At 40!

THEY LAUGH

And lives in Suffolk.

And dabbles in property, but you can't say that.

Banker's a dirty word today.

Good old school round the corner.

Tim and Penny Hicks are celebrating their 44th year on Portland Road.

Jean Dawes is still living just one street away from Portland Road

where she was born.

All her old friends have left the area.

John Wakelin is enjoying his retirement in Cornwall with his family.

Nico and Natasha are looking for a house at the south end of the street

and planning their retirement there.

Henry Mayhew is loving his new life away from Portland Road.

I said to my mum once, "Look where I come from.

"I've improved in where I came from."

I said, "And look at where my kids are now.

"My kids have improved on me."

You know, we was almost on the bottom, if not the bottom,

and those houses were the lowest of the low, those houses.

And you move up a step.

All my children all own their own houses.

From nothing, we've improved.

What shall I get them to say, cheese?

MAN: Sex!

LAUGHTER

Next week, we go south of the river to Bermondsey

and meet the people of Reverdy Road,

quiet, respectable and proud of their roots.

I'm working class. I always will be, you know.

Waterbed.

'Who wants to be middle class anyway?'

And, in a very different kind of house,

we'll meet the direct descendant of the people who built Reverdy Road.

Pretty special, isn't it?

As I say to everyone, "The day that I wake up

"and I don't enjoy the view is the day I need to retire."