Notting Hill, c1948–c1970: The Local Context
Why Notting Hill?
In 1948, Notting Hill in west London was a faded Victorian district. The grand stuccoed terraces of Powis Square, Powis Terrace and Colville Square — built in the mid-nineteenth century for an emerging middle class — had slipped down the social scale by the 1900s and decayed steadily through two world wars. By the late 1940s, many of these large houses had been carved into bedsits and lodgings for working-class tenants. The Blitz had destroyed thousands of London homes, and the post-war housing shortage was acute. Caribbean migrants who arrived after the 1948 Empire Windrush faced a national colour bar in housing: most landlords would not let to Black tenants. Notting Hill was one of the few areas in London where rooms were available, partly because the housing stock was already so degraded that landlords were less choosy about tenants. The neighbourhood’s Caribbean community was not chosen so much as funnelled.
Three forces concentrated Caribbean migrants in Notting Hill after 1948: the post-war housing shortage following the Blitz, the colour bar that closed off most other London neighbourhoods, and the area’s decayed Victorian housing stock where rooms were available because landlords had given up on respectability. Notting Hill was the result of restriction, not preference.
Houses of Multiple Occupation and the Sub-Let System
Most Caribbean tenants in Notting Hill lived in houses of multiple occupation (HMOs). A typical Powis Square house might have been carved into 8–12 bedsits sharing one kitchen and one bathroom, with a single family in each room. Rents were high relative to what tenants could earn — landlords charged a premium because of the colour bar elsewhere. Conditions were often dangerous: damp walls, faulty wiring, blocked drains, broken sash windows. London County Council inspectors recorded multiple breaches but enforcement was patchy.
Pull and push factors operated together at the level of the street. The pull factor for new arrivals was that they could find a Caribbean family to rent a room from, often through word of mouth at the docks or on the boat over. The push factor was that no white landlord further west would let to them. Sociologist Ruth Glass’s 1960 study of Notting Hill, Newcomers, documented these patterns in detail. Once a street had two or three Caribbean households, it tended to acquire more — not because the community sought segregation but because chain migration through family contacts produced clusters.
Peter Rachman and the Limits of the Law
Peter Rachman, a Polish-born landlord active in Notting Hill from the mid-1950s, became the era’s most notorious figure. By 1959 Rachman owned around 100 properties in the area, most of them on Powis Square, Colville Terrace and Powis Terrace. His business model exploited a quirk of the 1957 Rent Act, which lifted rent controls on properties once they fell vacant. Rachman bought up Victorian houses with sitting white tenants on regulated low rents and used a series of tactics to drive them out: removing front doors, cutting off water and gas, sending heavies to bang on doors at night, and moving in disruptive lodgers. Once vacant, the houses were re-let to Caribbean families at three or four times the regulated rent — tenants who had nowhere else to go because of the colour bar. The term Rachmanism entered the language after his death in 1962 and the resulting press exposure during the Profumo affair of 1963.
A common error is to describe Notting Hill as a Caribbean community of choice. The opposite is closer to the truth. The colour bar in housing was systematic across most of London. Bedsit advertisements in the late 1950s often specified ‘No Coloureds’ alongside ‘No Irish’. Caribbean migrants who could afford suburban Mortlake, Wimbledon or Wood Green could not rent there because of skin colour. Notting Hill’s degraded housing stock made it one of the few neighbourhoods where landlords would let — in part because the houses were already in such poor repair that respectable tenants had moved out. Strong answers describe the area as a destination of restriction rather than preference.
A frequent simplification is to describe Peter Rachman as a slum landlord and stop there. The reality is more specific. Rachman ran an intimidation racket designed to evict regulated white tenants and re-let to Caribbean tenants at much higher rents. The mechanism mattered: Rachman exploited a loophole in the 1957 Rent Act, used named heavies and named techniques, and was personally connected to the Profumo affair scandal of 1963 — which is why his name became famous. The label ‘Rachmanism’ refers to the eviction-and-mark-up system, not to housing decay in general. Strong answers identify Rachman’s specific business model rather than a generic stereotype.
Bruce Kenrick and the Notting Hill Housing Trust
In response to the area’s housing crisis, the minister Bruce Kenrick, who had moved to Notting Hill in the early 1960s, founded the Notting Hill Housing Trust in 1963. The Trust raised charitable donations to buy up cheap properties and renovate them for low-income tenants, regardless of race. Within five years the Trust owned hundreds of properties across the borough. Kenrick went on to co-found the national homelessness charity Shelter in 1966, which raised the profile of the issue across Britain. The Trust’s model — charitable housing associations renovating older stock for low-income tenants — became a template for the housing-association movement that would expand from the late 1960s onwards.
Portobello Road: Market and High Street
Portobello Road market had operated since the late 19th century, originally as a daily fruit-and-vegetable market for local residents. From the late 1940s, antique stalls began to appear on Saturdays, and by the late 1950s the market drew traders and shoppers from across London. Caribbean migrants reshaped the market and the surrounding streets. Caribbean grocers sold yam, plantain, breadfruit and salt fish at the south end of the market by the early 1950s — ingredients that had previously been impossible to find in London. Cafes and barbershops opened around the market’s top end, including the cluster around the future Mangrove Restaurant on All Saints Road. By 1970 Portobello Road was one of the most diverse high streets in London, mixing Caribbean grocers, antique sellers, second-hand-record stalls and pubs that drew young Londoners from across the city. The market was an early sign that Notting Hill was becoming a cultural destination as well as a residential pressure cooker.
Two figures defined Notting Hill housing in the 1950s and 1960s: Peter Rachman, who exploited the colour bar to extract high rents from Caribbean tenants in poor conditions, and Bruce Kenrick, whose Notting Hill Housing Trust (1963) and the national charity Shelter (1966) built a charitable response that became a template for the wider housing-association movement.