This affordably handsome book confirms in my own partisan mind what a rich subject the area of Notting Hill in London is, and I can’t help approving of it for that reason alone.
Like it or not, Notting Hill exerts a peculiar fascination over many who don’t live there as well as all who do, but it is the latter who will fall on this book with cries of pleasure. It is a solid rebuff to those who prefer to think that Notting Hill is not so much a place of bricks and mortar, but an annoying media construct instead.
As a resident of two decades’ standing, I can confirm that the photographer’s well-composed vistas of gleaming stucco and Italianate churches, of sun-soaked plane trees, beautifully tended communal gardens (formerly known as ‘paddocks’), of specimens such as the playwright Simon Gray, or the butcher David Lidgate, have been rendered fair and square.
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