This is a walk from Ladbroke Grove station, north along Ladbroke Grove until the “Victoria Dwellings” steps and down them to Southern Row.
Ladbroke Grove, a two-mile long road that stretches from Kensal Green to Holland Park Avenue, is one of London’s longest roads. The area is often named after the road itself. The road was named after Sir Robert Ladbroke, a banker who acquired the land in 1750. Richard Weller, his heir, built luxurious villas on the estate, with baroque details, communal gardens, and stucco houses that radiated along an ever-increasing arc, around Lansdowne Crescent and Stanley Crescent.
After the Second World War, Ladbroke Grove became a haven for London’s bohemian intelligentsia. Mike Phillips, in Notting Hill in the 1960s, explained that “For some, the Grove was a testing ground in which they lived wild and free, uninhibited by laws and respectability.”
Ed Glinert describes how, in the early 1970s, the reclusive singer-songwriter Nick Drake sat in silence for some time in an unidentified property on Ladbroke Grove that had been taken over by drug users. He returned to the house in 1974, three days before he died of an overdose of anti-depressants, wracked by the advanced stages of paranoia and depression. He asked one of the residents, “You remember me. You remember how I was. Tell me how I was. I used to have a brain. I used to be somebody. What happened to me? What happened to me?”
The route next is Bosworth Road, Kensal Road, Golborne Road.
The Cheltenham Estate was built in 1969 and dominated by Trellick Tower, which opened in 1972 and immediately became “a magnet for crime, vandalism, drug abuse and prostitution”.
Elkstone Road is next en-route and finally Great Western Road.