At the beginning of the 1860s the latest map showed Ladbroke Grove as Ladbroke Road (after spells as Ladbroke Place, Lansdowne Terrace and Road) reaching as far as Lancaster Road, the isolated two-street Potteries, the Notting Barns and Porto Bello farms, and Porto Bello Lane joining the path from Notting Barns at the Porto Bello (now Ladbroke Grove) bridge over the Great Western Railway line.
Beyond that the future had arrived in the form of Kensal New Town, the area’s first proper urban slum and the site of the first Notting Hill race riot nearly 100 years before Notting Dale’s.
Although Kensal was a separate entity to Notting Hill and wasn’t even in Kensington at this point (up until 1900 the parish, which seems to have originated as Kingsholt, was a detached part of Chelsea), and the cause of the riot wasn’t so much racial conflict as a mix of religious and political differences. The Kensal Rows – West, Middle, East and Southern – appeared in the 1840s in the wake of the Great Western Railway, as an industrial slum island between the railway line and the canal. The area first gained notoriety in 1847 for the Kensal New Town arsenic poisoning tragedy, in which 6 members of the Hickman family died, particularly horribly, on Middle Row.
As Isambard Kingdom Brunel was buried at Kensal Green in 1859, Irish GWR navvies were settling alongside the line in Kensal New Town.
At the time of a particularly wet summer, which meant even harder times for brickmaking families, as Florence Gladstone put it, ‘racial jealousy under the guise of religious feelings’ developed between the British and Irish inhabitants. By 1860 Kensal was twice the size of the Potteries and Anglo-Irish cultural animosity was boiling over in the slum cauldron due to political events in Italy.
When British volunteers were fighting for the 1848 Italian revolutionary nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Irish were provoked by the question, “Who are your for? The Pope or Garibaldi?”
The ensuing riot in Middle Row sounds more like a traditional punch-up between the gangs of Kensal New Town, at least compared with the New York Draft riots of the time; nevertheless it took 300 policemen to pacify in a military style operation.
The police lined up to charge along the canal towpath on the site of the Job Centre. As ‘comparatively out of this world’ as the Potteries and Latymer Road, Kensal was isolated from respectable society by the industrial means of canal, railway and gas works, and also retained some rural vestiges. The village had its own rowdy market on Wedlake Street (until a chapel was built on the site), market gardens and some pigkeeping, but was more renowned for dogs.
The chief exponent of the Kensal dog-fancying trade was Bill George, a former prize-fighter whose ‘Canine Castle’ on Kensal Road was frequented by aristocrats and Charles Dickens when he was doing research for Bill Sikes’ dog Bullseye in ‘Oliver Twist’.
As well as the first Notting Hill riot, Kensal produced the first local bar boom which included the Portobello Arms (the first Portobello pub), the Lads in the Village, the Friend in Hand, Prince of Wales, Jolly Carpenters, and the Beehive on the site of Trellick Tower.
In another Nottingham-Notting Hill link, there were Robin Hood and Foresters pubs in both Kensal and Notting Dale; the Kensal Robin Hood and Little John was to the east of Trellick. Notting Dale had a Garibaldi pub on St Ann’s Road.
Kensal was also noted for gypsy fairs and trotting matches but was mostly known for fighting. The canal towpath was the venue of regular pitched battles between the Victorian slum gangs of Kensal New Town, Notting Dale, Harrow Road, Queen’s Park and Lisson Grove. Little Wormwood Scrubs hosted Sunday morning bare-knuckle bouts; one of which resulted in a local gypsy being tried for murder but found innocent. This was also the site of summer fairs with roundabouts and drinking booths which, according to Florence Gladstone, ‘were so disorderly that respectable people could not walk in that direction. It was only after the Wormwood Scrubbs regulation bill was passed in 1879 that this corner settled down to an orderly existence.’