One doesn’t hear much about Kensington these days. It’s funny to think it used to be such a big deal. Once upon a time it was where posh people lived, and famous people, and the parents of the richest kids in school. It was where Peter Pan met Wendy and where Bill Wyman (who is the opposite of Peter Pan, perpetually old, miraculously wrinkled, decrepit from the day he was born) opened a restaurant called Sticky Fingers, and no doubt had many nice lunches with the wife he met when she was not much older than Wendy herself.

But who ever talks about Kensington now? Be honest, when was the last time you met someone who lives in Kensington? If the answer is more recently than the turn of the millennium then you’re either 103 (why, hello, Mr Wyman) or Russian.

It was about ten years ago, I think, that Kensington disappeared from public discourse, to be replaced on the lips of the rich and classy by Notting Hill, Primrose Hill, Clerkenwell… and I wonder if that might have something to do with the death of Princess Diana.

When Diana died, a little piece of Kensington died, too. The skinny-legged, big-haired, shyly aloof, over-medicated, sexually martyred, soulless, bulimic glamour that the place had always represented was dazzlingly revealed, in the aftermath of the big bang at the Pont d’Alma, for the mirage it was. So we averted our eyes as it dispersed, and swore to pretend it had never been.

The commonalty trooped to Kensington Gardens to pay its respects one last time in the summer of 1997, shuffled forward to lay its petrol station forecourt floral tributes at the gates of the palace, and never went back. Nobody did. Kensington ceased to be.

I went back last week for the first time in ages to have a look at a new restaurant there (the cabbie said: “Kensington? Dear oh lore, that takes me back…”), and thought I’d walk around a bit before lunch to get the feel.

I swear to God I didn’t hear English spoken for an hour. And when I did, it was an American asking directions from a Russian who spoke it better than he did – although neither of them knew where Notting Hill Gate was, which is clearly where both would rather have been.

I looked into Sticky Fingers – empty.

I looked into the cinema – empty, and soon to close for redevelopment into flats, the ticket guy told me, no doubt because English language flicks just can’t turn a buck round here. I walked up grand old Phillimore Gardens and looked in the windows – empty, empty, empty. All Russian and Saudi-owned and inhabited maybe 60 days a year, or however many it is before you have to start paying tax. Just Filipino maids looking nervously out of attic windows. Private security companies patrolling the streets in fluorescent vans. Blacked-out Hummers oozing past, containing bearded teenagers in sunglasses listening to the kind of music they play in restaurants where a lot of aubergine is served, except with a hip-hop beat. No old duffers with mustard-coloured cords and sleeveless green quilted jackets. No Labradors.

Walking round Holland Park was, aurally, much as it must have been for survivors staggering around in the first gory minutes after the collapse of the Tower of Babel – the sheer, goggling, disorientating horror of no two people speaking the same language. Except here they had brought their fat little toddlers to play softball.

French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Portuguese, all living here, all thinking this is home (at least for as long as the bank keeps paying for the house). I felt a deep, throbbing racism right in my heart. That peculiar, unviolent racism one reserves for university-educated white European financiers who are neither stealing your jobs nor raping your women.

It was full of American bankers jogging. You can tell an American banker because he is hound-lean, wears top-of-the-range Asics, jogs holding a BlackBerry, and bangs into little old ladies (last of the natives) without saying sorry. When not running, he wears a black polo neck and a camel coat, eats egg-white omelette and, despite having been at Harvard Law, says “like” every third word.

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