Pastel painted stucco terraces curve around private garden squares, with Portobello Road's market running the length of the area.
What Notting Hill looks like
runs the length of the area from north to south. Three and four storey stucco and brick shopfronts line much of it, with a market that spreads stalls and clothing racks along the kerb. The 's terracotta Edwardian front, dated 1910, sits part way down the road. Fluted pilasters frame its arched doorway.
Away from the market, the streets curve into crescents of four and five storey terraced houses. Each one is stuccoed in white, cream or a pastel pink, blue or yellow over London stock brick. Pedimented doorways and iron railings front the raised ground floors, with steps down to basement areas below street level. and the crescents around it keep the same scale and paintwork for block after block.
, at the corner with Talbot Road, is one of the private communal gardens the terraces are built around. Its houses face the square rather than the street. , off Portobello Road, is a quieter run of the same stuccoed shopfronts. Antique dealers and a secondhand bookshop sit among them.
runs along the northern edge of the area, lined with more of the same stuccoed terraces behind garden squares. Notting Hill Carnival's parade runs along it every August. Traffic is kept off the street for the route, with static sound systems and stages set up along the pavements for the weekend.
Shot in Notting Hill
Notting Hill (1999) used a shopfront at 142 Portobello Road as the Travel Book Company, and the real secondhand bookshop that lent the film its name traded a few streets away on Blenheim Crescent. Powis Square, a few streets over, stood in for Turner's mansion in Performance three decades earlier.
Notting Hill, 1999
The production dressed the ground floor at 142 Portobello Road as the Travel Book Company, the secondhand travel bookshop William Thacker runs in the film. The real shop that inspired it, The Travel Bookshop, traded on Blenheim Crescent until 2011 and is now the Notting Hill Bookshop.
Performance, 1970
Powis Square
Played Turner's mansion, 1970
Performance used the square for the exterior of Turner's mansion, with the interior filmed separately at a house in Knightsbridge. The square was run down and largely empty when the production shot here, not the smartly kept gardens standing today.
Clifton's own stucco crescents, including Royal York Crescent, are built in the same creamy white paintwork and terraced scale as Notting Hill's own streets. A production dressed Clifton's Bruton Place and Frederick Place as Notting Hill for a Doctor Who Christmas special in 2023, swapping the street signs for the shoot. Clifton's streets run steeply downhill toward the Avon Gorge, which shows in any wide or elevated shot that Notting Hill's flatter grid does not. Try searching stucco crescents now.
Cheltenham's Montpellier and Lansdown districts carry the same stuccoed crescents around private gardens, raised in the 1820s and 1830s around the same years the Ladbroke estate's terraces went up in Notting Hill. Cheltenham's stucco runs a more uniform cream across whole crescents, and the spa town's wider boulevards read differently from Notting Hill's narrower residential streets in a full establishing shot. Try searching stuccoed crescents now.
Alamo Square in San Francisco, California
Alamo Square's row of brightly painted Victorian houses facing the square is a patterned terraced block, much like the pastel paintwork on Notting Hill's own crescents. The San Francisco houses are wood framed with bay windows and steep gabled roofs, a different construction from Notting Hill's stucco. A tight, colour matched frame hides that difference, but the hill rising behind the houses has no equivalent here. Try searching painted terraced houses now.
