Notting Hill, W11: the evening that stays behind a front door

Crescents, communal gardens and a market street

The grand part of W11 is the run of crescents and garden squares above Holland Park Avenue: Lansdowne, Stanley, Ladbroke. Most of the houses behind them share a private communal garden, invisible from the street and reached through a gate that residents guard carefully. Those gardens explain the district better than anything else does. Life here happens inside a block rather than on it.

Portobello Road runs north through the middle, quiet on a weekday evening and unrecognisable on a Saturday morning. Westbourne Grove crosses it with the restaurants that stay awake latest in this postcode, and the Electric Cinema sits between the two with armchairs at the back and a projectionist who still takes it seriously.

There is very little hotel stock, which is the point. Bookings here are overwhelmingly to houses and flats, and the evenings are correspondingly long. A three hour arrangement at £700 is the ordinary shape of a W11 booking, and dinner dates at £900 are common enough that Delphine asks about them by default.

The few rooms with a key at the desk

Where a hotel is wanted, the choice is small and rather good. W2 4DU sits on Pembridge Gardens a minute from Notting Hill Gate, five townhouses joined together with art on the walls and no lobby to speak of. W11 4UL is the large modern house at the Holland Park end, near the roundabout. W2 4RJ faces Bayswater Road on the park side, and W8 4PT stands at the Kensington Gardens corner with the better views of the four.

Nothing links this house to any of those four, nor to a hotel anywhere else in the city. A companion attends as an invited guest and is not announced to anybody.

The more usual Notting Hill booking is a front door on a crescent with a flight of steps up to it and a light left on. Delphine wants the street, the number, the bell and whether the door has been left on the latch or not. She does not want anything more than that.

Honest minutes, and the ride west

Notting Hill Gate station sits about 1 minute from the top of Pembridge Road, with the Central, Circle and District lines under it. Bayswater is roughly 6 minutes east on the Circle and District. Ladbroke Grove, on the Circle and Hammersmith and City lines, is some 8 minutes north through the market.

The honest figure for a companion coming from the centre is twenty minutes by car on an ordinary evening, and closer to half an hour when the Bayswater Road is unhappy, which it often is around seven. Two of our companions live ten minutes away in Paddington, so W11 is quicker for them than it would be for anybody starting in SW1. Either way the district is inside the second fare zone and her travel is already within the fee.

What this means in practice is that Notting Hill rewards a little notice. Write in the afternoon for an evening booking and nothing about the traffic matters. Write at half past seven for eight o'clock and Delphine will tell you plainly what is achievable rather than promise you a minute she cannot hold.

Why guests choose this postcode

Some live here and simply want the evening to come to them. Others deliberately book west precisely because they work in the centre, and a district where nobody from the office has any reason to be is worth twenty minutes in a car.

The third group are visitors who have taken a house for a week through an agency rather than a suite in Mayfair, and who want an evening that matches: a film in armchairs, a long table on Westbourne Grove, a walk back through streets where the only sound is a gate closing.

Two who know W11 properly

Laura starts a Notting Hill evening at the Electric on Portobello Road, in the armchairs at the back, and eats afterwards rather than before, on Westbourne Grove where a kitchen is still awake at eleven. Vanessa prefers the long version: a quiet room on Ledbury Road and three hours that never once feel like three hours. Both live ten minutes east in Paddington and walk it when the evening is dry.

Nora is a short run down the Bayswater Road and Liana about fifteen minutes from Marylebone, so W11 is quicker for them than it would be for anybody starting south of the park. Every other name in the Salon comes west at the same tariff, and the ride is inside the fee.

The true neighbours of this postcode are Holland Park to the south, Bayswater and Queensway east, and Kensington below the gardens; none of them has a page of its own here, though all are within a few minutes of a W11 front door. The nearest addresses this book does write about lie east along the Bayswater Road: the Park Lane hotel row is roughly ten minutes at a quiet hour, the Mayfair blocks a few minutes beyond it, and the Knightsbridge park strip about fifteen on the south side of the park. The full list of addresses gathers them all.