House prices in desirable areas of British cities have rocketed, changing some inner-city communities beyond recognition through the process of "super-gentrification". Across some areas of the UK, streets that once housed poor people are now beyond the means of all but the well-off.

The path to gentrification is clear when modern streets are compared with maps created by the Victorian social researcher Charles Booth a century ago. It’s particularly obvious in Portland Road in London’s Notting Hill.

There are the multi-million pound houses, three-stories high, without so much as a curtain out of place. There’s a beauty spa, a wine bar and a gallery selling artworks that cost tens of thousands of pounds. It’s hard to believe it used to be one of the worst slums in London.

The houses on Portland Road were built in the 1850s on waste land between the downmarket Norland estate, home to the squalid piggeries and potteries, and the fancy new Ladbroke Estate, which became Notting Hill.

Maps created by Booth in 1899 show how two-thirds of the residents of Portland Road were classified as poor.

By the time Booth’s map was updated in 1929, the residents towards the northern end of Portland Road had moved into a different category: "Degraded and semi-criminal".
Houses slipped into multiple occupation and became run down, with shared toilets and no bathrooms.

The abolition of rent control in 1957 was meant to encourage investment in property. But it led to ruthless landlords - like the infamous Peter Rachman - trying to cash in on the now lucrative housing market by bullying tenants into leaving. It triggered the gentrification of Portland Road and was the beginning of the end of the street’s working class community.

New ’super-gentrifiers’ are different to the pioneer gentrifiers, who sent their children to the local primary school and engaged with the existing community.

The one part of Portland Road that was never truly gentrified is the northern end, where social housing replaced run-down tenement buildings that had housed brewery workers.

Built in the 1930s, Winterbourne House and Nottingwood House are just a few hundred yards from properties worth millions of pounds. Flats cost an average of £340,000, compared with the average price for a house at the southern end of Portland Road of £3.5m. (2012)

A deprivation map produced by Kensington & Chelsea Borough Council in 2007 showed that while some of the top earners in the country live in the southern and central parts of Portland Road, some of the lowest 5% live at the north end.


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