The Kings and Queens of Notting Dale

i went to see my mother yesterday for my usual weekly visit. Grenfell Tower was on fire, and there were about a dozen people on the Tube, all getting off, same as me, at Shepherd’s Bush Station, all carrying bags of food and clothes, all asking for directions to Notting Dale.

Now, Notting Dale is not easy to find. You have to know where you’re going to get there. It’s sort of sandwiched between Ladbroke Grove and Holland Park. I gave up trying to offer directions and suggested everyone just follow me. From the balcony in my mum’s flat in North Kensington, I could see a portion of the tower, still burning. I grew up in that area; I suppose you could say it was “my manor.” Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there always seemed to be a film crew somewhere in Notting Dale shooting a scene for programs such as Minder, The Sweeney, and The Professionals. I must have walked past that tower block a million times when I was a kid, but I never paid it much notice. Today, I cannot get it out of my mind.

I joined the incredibly long queue outside St. Clement’s Church to assist in relief efforts—delivering food and water to those displaced from their homes. It was around 3:00 p.m., and already the place was bursting at the seams with donations. A guy had to go outside to turn people away. Afterward, I decided to take a quick stroll around the neighborhood, and what I saw was so sad but also so brilliant: Men and women, young and old. Boys and girls. All colors, all faiths, all sizes, helping one another out, talking to one another, passing bottles of water around to the brave men and women of our emergency services.

Not that I was surprised. Holland Park, Ladbroke Grove, Notting Hill, Notting Dale, et cetera—we are all north kensington. We have always had that spirit. It was the same kind of spirit we had in 1959, when North Kensington came together and told that fascist Oswald Mosley to fuck off out of it when he tried to march through the streets of Ladbroke Grove. The same spirit that helped conceive the Notting Hill Carnival. The people of North Kensington did not let themselves down yesterday. In fact, they exceeded expectations. My love and respect always to them. And to others who came from far and wide to help out. And, of course, to the victims and residents of Grenfell Tower.

June 14, 2017

What follows is an excerpt from The Kings and Queens of Notting Dale. In this final scene, it is 2021, and the play’s central characters come together onstage. The narrator, Ryan, leads the group in reflecting on a world beginning to emerge from the pandemic, and he offers a moment of hope for the Notting Dale community.

2021

The entire company is coming together onstage.

ryan At the time of writing, finally, the entire country is seeing some wood for the trees. At the last count, three vaccines have been rolled out, and the government as well as the scientists is predicting that life, at least as we know it, will be back to normal by the end of 2021.

karen Unless Boris finds some new way of fucking that up.

ryan A bit of faith, Karen.

karen You are a better man than I am.

carmen Never mind that—this is not a play about COVID. Tell them why we are here.

leon To end the performance.

carmen And?

ryan Thank you, Carmen.

carmen Auntie Carmen!

ryan Sorry, keep forgetting. Auntie.

carmen Tell them, then. Will somebody?

ryan We will get to that, I promise. In case you still do not know, Notting Dale is a real place. When you think of Notting Dale, you think of Notting Hill, right? The blue door, Hugh Grant, and Julia Roberts?

johnny David Cameron?

leon He was quite a face in the area. He used to shop at Tesco on Portobello Road. He’d ride there on his bike. Someone nicked it, once.

carmen Leon?

leon I didn’t say it was me.

carmen Mind you don’t; we have witnesses now.

sam And he is not a face, David fucking Cameron. Hill, maybe, but not the Dale.

karen Grove, Dale—what’s the difference, Dad?

sam A lot.

ryan Which Jean will care to explain. Her family has been here for generations. Jean?

jean The entire area of Notting Dale was once nothing but agricultural land belonging to two farms, Notting Barns and Portobello, together covering four hundred acres. During the 1800s, the area went through several industrial stages, such as pottery production, before becoming overrun with pig farming and other “noxious” trades. The Dale had a large Irish population at the time, and the Roman Catholic Church of St. Francis of Assisi opened on Pottery Lane in 1860. One of the architects of that church was John Francis Bentley, who went on to design Westminster Cathedral. Living conditions, which had long been bad in the Dale, soon got even worse. In 1893, a local newspaper called the Dale the most “hopelessly degraded” place in London. But according to the statistician Charles Booth, the upper class were enjoying their enormous wealth in Holland Park and Lansdowne Crescent, which was only a few hundred yards away.

sam You see? The more things change.

jean Some of London’s first housing associations began their work here, and Octavia Hill took over the management of run-down houses on St. Katherine’s Street. But despite the hard work and good intentions of many helpers and benefactors, the underlying malaise persisted for decades.

karen Check out the brain on Mum!

jean Shocked you now, haven’t I?

ryan Gus, care to cut in?

gus With pleasure. Some of Notting Dale’s first Spanish immigrants were refugees from their country’s civil war in the 1930s, while Caribbean immigrants came soon after on the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury Docks in 1948.

ryan Tim, you know you wanna.

tim Council flats replaced many of the slums from the 1950s onwards, notably in the form of Henry Dickens Court in 1953 and the Lancaster West Estate in the 1970s. Many Victorian properties in Notting Dale were beautifully restored so that parts of the locality soon presented an amazing upmarket aspect.

karen Bring it down, babe.

tim It’s the estate agent in me. Force of habit.

karen But most local residents don’t own houses like these.

carmen True, that.

sam That’s my girl.

karen They rent flats in municipally built blocks that are nowadays managed by a tenant management organization or housing association—including Octavia Housing.

ryan Which of course, as promised, brings us to the night of June 14, 2017. The Lancaster West Estate’s Grenfell Tower went up in flames. Seventy people died in the fire, in addition to a baby who was stillborn after his parents escaped and a seventy-four-year-old woman who died seven months after being rescued from the flames. I wish I had time to name every single one of the seventy-two. But their names are listed in the program. I urge you all to have a read on your way home. You don’t have to feel guilty trying to pronounce all of their names.

Just acknowledge them. Find out who they were. Find out about Khadija Saye, who died trying to escape the building with her mother. She was a young woman on the verge of a major breakthrough as a visual artist. Find out about Firdaws Hashim, a bright, promising twelve-year-old burned to death on the twenty-second floor. Only months before, she was given an award by Bill Gates himself for her public-speaking skills. Not bad for a tower block that some people said was full of nothing but illegal immigrants, scroungers, and lowlifes. I dare you to exhume them. I demand that you exalt every single one of them. The fatal rapidity with which the fire spread was widely blamed on the neglectful indifference of the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organization, which was entrusted with maintaining the estate, and on the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council, which was supposed to oversee the work of the KCTMO.

leon Murderers!

tim That’s a little extreme.

leon They have blood on their hands.

tim That is not quite the same thing.

The company turns on Tim.

leon What are you saying, man?

tim Do you think they and anyone else wanted this to happen?

avril Whether they wanted it or not, they never bleeding cared. They still don’t.

tim Come on, I’m just expressing a view.

karen “The victims of the fire lacked common sense” was also a view.

tim That is not fair.

karen That Jacob Rees-Mogg was even conceived isn’t fair. I mean, bloody hell, Tim.

ryan Everyone, I’m almost done. Don’t kill him—at least not yet.

The look on Tim’s face is one of horror.

ryan That was a joke, Tim. It was around 3:00 p.m. the afternoon after, and I took a walk around the manor, and what I saw was so sad but also so brilliant: Men and women, young and old. Boys and girls. All colors, all faiths, all sizes, helping one another out, talking to one another, passing bottles of water around to the brave men and women of our emergency services. Not that I was surprised. We have always had that spirit. It was the same kind of spirit we had in 1959, when the community came together and told that fascist Oswald Mosley to fuck off out of it when he tried to march through our streets.

Jean receives a high number of high fives and fist bumps.

jean I thank you.

ryan It was the same spirit that helped conceive the Notting Hill Carnival. That healed the wounds caused by the murder of Kelso Cochrane. We did not let ourselves down on June 14. In fact, we exceeded expectations. The community have gathered round. Our community. That’s the way it is around here. We’re not even a community—we’re a family. We’re Muslims, we’re Christians, we’re Sikhs, we’re Hindus. We’re Spanish, we’re white, we’re Black, we’re brown, we’re something in between. Some are still here; some are gone. All we did—all we ever did—was to dream. To love. To lose as well as win. We are kings and we are queens. Remember Grenfell. Remember the seventy-two. Remember Notting Dale. Remember us.