I’d been nagged for years to do an update of Inside Notting Hill – a book I’d first published under the imprint Portobello Publishing in 2001. The first edition had been an instant success and had much positive press coverage – but it had been hard work.

After its British success, and in part due to the popularity of the film Notting Hill, we decided to have a launch party in New York. The date we chose was September 11, 2001. And although several people came to the party – it seemed so trivial to be plugging Notting Hill that the book was never the success in America that it might have been.

Self-publishing is certainly easier now than it was, but there are so many details to think about when you are both writing and publishing. Conventionally there is an author, an agent and a publisher who has many different departments: production, accounts, marketing, designing, editing, proof-reading, photo research, publicity and distribution. My co-author Miranda Davies and myself did hire a designer and a style-editor but otherwise took on all these tasks ourselves.

This time round I have used the imprint Umbrella Books – as in the interim another publisher called Portobello Books has started and I didn’t want people to get confused – they are much bigger than me. Our book celebrates the diversity of Notting Hill – we published it initially to show that there was much more to the neighbourhood than the film – indeed there is an entire piece on films made in the area dating back to Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 film Red Shoes.

The book is really many books in one – the first section is walks through the area, with detailed descriptions of churches and other landmarks followed by annotated listings of shops, bars and restaurants. The second section has chapters on music, Carnival and film followed by one on history. The music scene in Notting Hill, includes among others Pink Floyd, Hawkwind, Bob Marley and the Clash.

The Carnival, now a massive event that attracts people from all over the world, started in the early 1960s with children of all races parading the streets dressed as folk heroes. The name Notting Hill probably derives from the Saxon ‘sons of Cnotta’ who settled in the area around AD 700 - there is little evidence of the Saxon past but what is very apparent, as one walks round the streets, is that Notting Hill was one of the most grandiosely conceived suburbs in the country.

The fourth section has extracts from a cross-section of writings dating from Lady Mary Coke’s 1774 description of an occasion in her usually peaceful Holland House garden: “I have had another vexation that never happen’d to me before, the having of a pack of hounds in my garden, & several men on Horseback broke into my grounds … ” up to an extract about the late-lamented Fresh and Wild in Westbourne Grove from Rachel Johnson’s 2006 novel Notting Hell.

Osbert Lancaster, who was born in Elgin Crescent, remembers: "At that time Elgin Crescent … was situated on the Marches of respectability. Up the hill to the south, tree-shaded and freshly stuccoed, stretched the squares and terraces of the last great stronghold of Victorian propriety: below to the north lay the courts and alleys of Notting Dale, through which, so my nurse terrifyingly assured me, policemen could only proceed in pairs."

The fortunes of Notting Hill have fluctuated wildly: in the 1950s and 1960s Rachman was one of the more notorious landlords and much of the area was a slum and the Profumo Affair was just one of the events of the 1960s that kept the neighbourhood on the map.

Among other extracts Virginia Ironside has written about Anna Kavan who lived in Hillsleigh Road: "It was a perfect place for her to live: to the south was genteel Kensington, with the department stores and retired upper-class couples taking their walks in Kensington Gardens; to the north was Notting Hill, a run-down area, where recent immigrants from the West Indies struggled to survive in overcrowded, dilapidated housing."

John Michell describes the times when Michael X hung out in the Grove: "The Grove, as it was then called, stretching from Ladbroke Grove eastwards towards Paddington, had never been a fashionable district, and by the end of the war it was partly derelict. Rooms and flats in its crumbling houses were among the cheapest in London".

What a contrast to Rachel Johnson’s lifestyle descriptions of Westbourne Grove in the 21st century: "I hear one say to the other that she's so into this place because they have all the best stuff, and when something sprouts, 'It’s, like, at the peak of its life force and energy'. I make a mental note that people talk about wholefood these days in just the same reverential and boring way they used to talk about Ecstasy in the 1980s."

The pieces we have chosen for the book show Notting Hill in all its rich diversity and with its history and up-to-date listings we hope that it will be of interest and use to many people.

For more information: www.umbrellabooks.com

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