Rachel Johnson

Sunlight on stucco

Rachel Johnson

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. Derry Moore has not needed to apply the rosy-tinted Vaseline to his lens, as if photographing a fading beauty. He is recording the district at its apogee.

The ornamental gardens and public drives are reaching their peak of perfection too, as Moore notes: ‘In the early years . . . by the time the trees had reached maturity, the buildings were becoming neglected.’ Today, with the trees and gardens in their prime and the buildings properly cared for, he says, the vision of the man who planned the Ladbroke Estate, Thomas Allom, ‘is probably nearer realisation than at any previous time’.

The strongest shots in the book are the bare streetscapes, made to look like dramatic stage sets, and angled to reveal the vistas and overlaps of the area’s intricate, maze-like layout, pictures which reveal that Moore’s real joy and interest is in recording window pelmets and street railings and the way that sunlight falls on stucco, and not the area’s celebrities, markets, bars and shops.

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