London Notting Hill - Photos

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Photos

Now see the real Notting Hill! Photos were taken by me on Sunday, 20th June 1999 in mid-afternoon.

		Everyone should recognise this door by now...except the paparazzi waiting for Julia Roberts have now been replaced by gas works. See, told you this was the real Notting Hill. This is in fact the front door of the house that used to belong to Notting Hill's writer, Richard Curtis. He sold it for an unknown fee, yet being in Notting Hill, it's bound to be rather a lot. The proper inside of this house is nothing like the inside of Hugh Grant's place as shown in the film (apparently so, it's not as if I have been in there). Unfortunately, the blue door is no more! It was auctioned off for the charity, and the house got a ordinary black door as a replacement.


In the film, Hugh Grant bumps into Julia Roberts (and spills orange juice all over her) in front of a boarded up shop. Well, here's what's become of that shop, a Coffee Republic. This is on the corner of Westbourne Park Road (to the left in the picture) and Portobello Road (to the right) where you would see countless stalls on six days of the week (this was taken on Sunday, hence the lack of them).


Although in the film Hugh Grant owned "The Travel Book Co.", the shop on which that was based is actually called The Travel Bookshop, as shown here below. The red writing that you can just about see on the window reads "We're nearly famous now" (!). The Travel Bookshop is in a street containing other specialist bookshops. On the left you see Books for Cooks, another such bookshop, which also houses a small restaurant in the back and sometimes holds cookery demonstrations.


Just round the corner from the above bookshops is 192, the fashionable Notting Hill restaurant (although are places in Notting Hill anything else nowadays?). Most famous for being Bridget Jones' hangout where she met up with her chums.


And talking about fashionable places, above you see the Pharmacy Restaurant and Bar, co-owned by Damien Hirst, which was on Notting Hill Gate - it is now no more! Previously, it was simply called "Pharmacy" which got it into some trouble - apparently the name, coupled with the window displays of the restaurant (all manner of pill boxes), made some people think it was an actual pharmacy and thus the owners were forced to rename it. Cheekily bypassing this by rearranging the letters to form "Achy Ramp" and then "Army Chap" it now has this rather boring name. But I guess there's no more confusion (is there?). This place is also no more - it has now become a Marks & Spencer Food shop!


Now we're a stone's throw away from Notting Hill, in High St. Kensington. The picture to the left looks west, whilst the one below shows the road continuing east, eventually reaching Kensington Gardens and Kensington Palace.