Getting it Straight in Notting Hill Gate

From 43AD, and the building of the (no doubt very straight) Roman Great West Road to Silchester, to 2009, another bout of Carnival Riots and David Cameron getting his bike nicked outside Tescos on the Grove, (retrieved with the help of a friendly / non-class conscious Rasta), long time Portobello Road resident and local historian/psychogeographer Tom Vague takes us on a breathless romp through the peoples history of W10, taking in Roman Coffins on Ladbroke Grove and Civil War skirmishes in Holland Park, Russian occultists at 77 Elgin Crescent, Tory anarchist GK Chesterton and his Napoleon of Notting Hill, Thomas Hardy compering poetry nights at 84 Holland Park Avenue with Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, the pre WW1 Vorticist art HQ on Campden Hill Road ,WW2 bombs on Ladbroke Grove, Halliday Christie moving to 10 Rillington Place, teenage teddy boys rampaging at the Prince of Wales Cinema on Harrow Road, Max Mosely painting fascist Union Movement graffiti around Notting Hill in 1956, Peter Rachman renting properties to the ‘blacks and Irish’ before ruthlessly exploiting them all and ratcheting up local tensions, the infamous race riots of 1959, future Home Secretary Alan Johnsons’ original mod band the Area playing the Pavillion pub on North Pole Road in 1965, Pink Floyd at the Free School, All Saints Church, 1966, Performance, Powis Square 1969, Mick Farrens’ proto-punk Deviants at 56 Chesterton Road in 1970, Strummer, Jones and Simenon’s Clash on the Westway, in the Elgin, at the carnival riots….