Residents with Reputations.

The struggle of successive generations to realise the lofty vision of the Ladboke Estate’s original designers is reflected in those who lived in its houses. From the outset, the grand proportions and bohemian reputation attracted those who saw themselves as being at the ‘fringes of establishment’ whilst the (at times) extremely low rents also drew those who were most definitely beyond it.

Early inhabitants included Punch illustrator John Leech, who lived in Holland Park Avenue in the 1850s and early 60s and the illustrator for Charles Dickens’ books, Hablot Browne. Better know as Phiz, Browne lived in Ladbroke Grove from 1872- 1880.

A few years later, the theosophist and mystic, Helena Petronova Blavatsky moved into Lansdowne Crescent, from where she practised until her (doubtless foreseen) death in 1890. In 1904, Lansdowne House Studios, Lansdowne Road, were purpose-built by William Flockhart to provide studios and a home for his painter and designer friends. With high ceilings and large, north facing windows, the studios were ideal places to work, though the building contained not a single bathroom.

The artists who lived and worked there included James Pryde, (1866-1941), Charles Ricketts (1866-1931), Charles Shannon (1863-1937), Glyn Philpot (1884-1937), Vivian Forbes (1891-1937) and F. Cayley Robinson (1862- 1927), all of whom are commemorated by a blue plaque on the building.

The Lansdowne House artists may have been familiar with the writer Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), who lived for a time at 95 Elgin Crescent and with Edmund Dulac, the artist and illustrator, who lived in Ladbroke Road from 1912 until 1939. Nearby, in Ladbroke Grove, lived the publisher, writer, and humanitarian Sir Victor Gollancz, who was there from 1929-1953, during which time he wrote some of his most influential works.

By the 1950s, the Ladbroke Estate was still fighting for acceptance by the higher echelons of the establishment. The fight was certainly assisted by the passionate attentions of Sir Hugh Casson, who lived in Elgin Crescent and maintained a lifelong interest in the area.

The 1960’s saw perhaps the first examples the British public had seen of politicians brushing shoulders with pop stars and again typified the ‘dual personality’ of the estate. High flyers such as Anthony Crosland and Roy (now Baron) Jenkins moved into Lansdowne Road and Ladbroke Square respectively (the Jenkins’s in 1959, to be precise), with rock stars such as Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger a stone’s throw away.

Hendrix, of course, met an untimely end in his flat in Lansdowne Crescent in 1970. Four years later, the writer James Pope-Hennessy invited two would-be lovers back to his home in Ladbroke Grove and told them of his recent commission to write a biography of Noel Coward. Unfortunately, he also revealed the large advance he had already been paid – and they promptly murdered him for it.

Towards the end of the twentieth century, the area continued to attract the glamorous and the high-profile, from writers and film makers such as Richard Curtis (who wrote Notting Hill & Love Actually) to the media businessman and Labour Peer Lord Hollick.

The turn of the century has also seen confirmation of what many residents had suspected for some time: the Ladbroke Estate now holds as much appeal to Fund Managers as it does Rock Stars and has at last achieved, the respectability its originators envisaged.