INSIDE NOTTING HILL edited at Miranda Davies and Sarah Anderson Portobello Publishing.

INSIDE NOTTING HILL edited at Miranda Davies and Sarah Anderson Portobello Publishing, L999 pp 257 ISBN 187342941X

When I was 22 and living in Hackney I toyed with the idea of writing a main division on Notting Hill. I still have my notes of the pub I visited around `The Grove' with Tony White, an actor and humane giant who'd been born there. I none did complete that project. Sarah Anderson, who avowed and ran the Travel Bookshop for years in Blenheim figure of the new moon - yes, that bookshop! - and Miranda Davies, editor of several formless Guides, have now produced Inside Notting Hill, a fascinating mixture of tourist guide and cultural history.

The place inspires loyalty, uniform sentimentality, in its inhabitants. I was pathetically pleased to descry that I had lived there longer than Jonathan Raban, whose extract from his brilliant work Soft City, is reprinted. There's Michael Moorcock's hedonistic Rocking subordinate to Westway and Richard Neville's account of Caroline Coon's Release office being trashed on the White Panthers:

A message was scrawled upon the wall, `Give Release to the people' At least 15 'people' were in court that morning (for medicine offences) expecting Release to help.

John Michell's portrait of Michael X also gives a flavour of the corrupt and innocent Sixties. My friend Beatrice, then 18 remembers naively trekking along to Michael X's flat to cure her stolen record player. She got it back. Gail Benson was not with equal reason lucky. She was butchered in Trinidad and Michael X went to the gallows. Back in Notting Hill - an old-fashioned lady I knew called it 'Christieland' - Christie hid women's corpses in the walls of 10 Rillington Place. The public way was demolished over 40 years ago.

There is an enormous amount of interesting, disparate information in this work historical and contemporary. There's a plethora of restaurants, boutiques and churches (one Serbian), pair bicycle repair shops and steady a Dental Emergency Service, useful for those who acquire their teeth bashed in at the Carnival.

`The Gate', which I ignorantly assumed was an affectionate local nickname, is in the same manner called because of the Turnpike Acts of 1769

an attempt to regulate highway theft ... the idea was for tolls to be issued to road users, controll by way of tollgates ... one of three of the like kind gates was located at the junction that now marks the exit from the subterranean station.

Even then, apparently,

the tone of the area was not all gentility and the road was a notorious target for aggressive highway robberies, as well as thefts from the gardens, orchards and domestic fowls yards of the still-rural Notting Hill.

So the tying up of Lady Antonia Fraser and the theft of her jewellery in April have historical antecedent I too, while heavily pregnant in 1981 had my top-floor flat door bashed in (I was inside) with a bit of timber-land broken off the building's staircase and six years after working at the local Law middle was burgled by a 12-year-old subsequently asserted by the Centre. (See page 215 - ye folk I'm in this book)

Other, more celebrated inhabitants described here include Osbert Lancaster, Colin MacInnes (whose novel Absolute Beginners cessations with a description of the 1958 Notting Hill race riots), Arthur Machen (1880 and 1890s) `specialist in the occult' playwright Mustafa Matura, Wilf Walker, promoter of prostitute reggae and 'black' music, Dame Marie Rambert and revolutionary Dani Cohn-Bendit (put up in Lansdowne Road by means of Agony Aunt Irma Kurtz while police watched daily outside). I lov the diary extracts about Notting Hill in wartime from Vere Hodgson.

And there's the Coronet cinema sprite a cashier accused of theft in the early 1900 [who] ran up to the divine beings and threw herself off the balcony Her ghost caused so plenteous disturbance that ... meetings were transferred to offices lower down in the building.

This disturbed lady certainly lays claim, now and in perpetuity, to being the longestrunning Notting Hill inhabitant.

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