From the Publisher
Hermione Cameron's commentary accompanies a unique collection of photographs and postcards and takes a sideways look at this popular London district, unearthing the notable, the quizzical and the amusing in Notting Hill's history.
Product Description
Discover London's Notting Hill as it was a hundred years ago.
Take a step back in time to the elegant Edwardian era and see the first photographs of Notting Hill tube station. Then follow the now famous routes to the bustling market stalls of Portobello Road and see where residents with some wonderful surnames lived. Find out where the only Jealous man in London was a pub landlord, the Madders sisters had a dancing school, where you could have found Mrs Memory's hat shop or hoped that spinster Miss Perfect eventually found Mr Right, all those years ago. With more than 200 images from photographs and vintage postcards.
ROBERT ELMS - BBC LONDON
"If you want to know what Notting Hill was like all those years ago, this is a very good place to start. It's 'Notting Hill Behind the Scenes,' and it's been compiled and lovingly annotated by Hermione Cameron."
Lucy Davies, Louise T Blouin Institute Talks
"Cameron's book of photographs and postcards (the first in a Behind the Scenes series) surveys images of Notting Hill from a century ago; evidently, back then the area was populated by characters like the superbly monikered Mrs Memory and Miss Perfect, rather than celebrities and trustafarians."
TIME OUT LONDON
"Meet Walter Carter, west London fishmonger, here photographed with his wife, four of his six children and several hundred bloaters, kippers and oysters - a collection that must have made this a particularly pongy part of Portobello Road market. The market sprang up in the 1870s from a horse-trading fair, and was a regular fruit-and-veg market until antiques stalls started appearing after World War II. Carter is just one of Notting Hill's former residents and shopkeepers to appear in a new book of historic photographs of the area. We also liked the picture of a cramped corner shop that went by the name of Marks & Spencer. Whatever happened to them?"
Picture Postcard Monthly
"A Stand-out Book in the Genre. Notting Hill Behind the Scenes follows the familiar format of showing us what a particular place was like a century ago. The postcard illustrations have the starring role, and the introduction and captions serve as footnotes, a touch of extra detail for the observer. Yet Hermione Cameron's gone in search of the people who populated the streets all those years ago, and she makes us look at them, too, by the trick of giving us some of the pictures twice, the second time with part of the detail magnified. It's a double-take that has you flitting from the general to the particular and back again, and above all makes the characters come alive. The author's in your face treatment of Notting Hill's Edwardian residents is a thought-provoking master stroke. The introduction instantly focuses on the inhabitants rather than the buildings and their history. She gives us Miss Perfect, William Jealous and the Madders sisters, along with many other residents: 'Seeing a familiar street all those years ago made me wonder about the past overlapping with the present: how we may walk in someone else's footsteps, turn the same street corner, pass the same shop and cross the same road, and do all this a century apart.' So, before Marc Bolan lived at 57 Blenheim Crescent, Emily Needham was a dressmaker there. The captions investigate the human side of Notting Hill, probing the people who ran the shops, lived in houses and worked in businesses. Even if you begin by not knowing Notting Hill, you're soon inside it, an inquisitive voyeur. "
The Hill Magazine
"We discover that the occupiers of 41 Pembridge Road offered the 'best prices for old artificial teeth' and that a Mr Simon Green lived in the current Travel Bookshop. If you're lucky you might even discover who used to call your house their own. Apart from the lack of cars and much smaller trees every road is charmingly, instantly identifiable."
Kensington and Chelsea News
"brings history to life.. discover the hidden stories which lie on every corner of our streets."
