The smart part of North Kensington is Notting Hill but we're in Notting Dale, its socially challenged counterpart. In the mid 18th century it was known for its piggeries, potteries and brickfields, not to mention the ill-health of its population. One of the bottle kilns unexpectedly survives, but it's not quite in Mary Place otherwise I'd kick off with a photo of that. Instead have this less thrilling shot instead, featuring a somewhat motley collection of buildings stretching all of 200m into the distance.
The building on the left is a former police station, long since vacated, built in 1966 on the site of the Royal Naval Patrol Headquarters. It's a foreboding block with ornately-barred windows, a disconnected public telephone by the entrance and a mothballed letter box labelled 'Letter Box' in the middle of a wall on Mary Place. It's been on the asset disposal list for a few years and will look a lot less creepy once it's eventually flats. Opposite is Avondale Park Primary School, a multistorey Victorian institution which several of the victims of the Grenfell fire attended. The green-hearted tower still rises a couple of streets to the north.
Housing along the remainder of Mary Place is very varied, from original Victorian to Dutch gables to fortified LCC to modern townhouses. All the properly nice terraced stuff is on adjacent streets. And yet this was once the site of the infamous Notting DaleWorkhouse, a labour yard which in 1882 evolved into a workhouse for the able-bodied. Men were forced to perform tough tasks like stone-breaking and corn-grinding for up to 60 hours a week and were only allowed an hour's leisure a day... during which they had to attend compulsory lectures. Leaving the premises for any reason was also disallowed, all of which helps explain why some called it the harshest workhouse in London. But the deterrent effect of the regime was such that the number of inmates eventually dwindled away, as no doubt was the plan, and the space was subsequently residentialised for returning WW1 soldiers.
The greenspace which stretches out on the southern side of the street is Avondale Park. These days it's multi-recreational and boasts a Green Flag, but was originally created out of a flooded clay pit so large it was known locally as 'The Ocean'. Alongside is the St George and Dragon, a former mission hall with a faded Arts & Crafts frontage which is now an artist's studio. The street has two retail units, one a Brazilian hairdressing salon of 30 years standing and the other a convenience shop called Mary Place Store. It sells groceries, lottery tickets, bottles of wine and Wall's ice cream, the last of which is an excellent segue into the next street (although it'll be several paragraphs before I explain why).
Joseph Avenue W3
I might previously have struggled to explain where Joseph Avenue is but these days I only need mention it's a two minute walk from Acton Main Line station (just past the cafe with a sausage on the roof). The street in question is a short dog-leg, technically a cul-de-sac leading to a cul-de-sac, sparsely dotted with four-storey blocks of flats. If you catch the 260 bus you can alight at a bus stop called Joseph Avenue immediately outside.
Joseph Avenue forms one third of a housing estate built in the late 1980s, the Friary Park Estate, originally for private sale but then unceremoniously purchased en bloc by Ealing Family Housing Association. It's nothing exciting, indeed at first sight unbloggable, and stands in complete contrast to the top notch villas which spread to the south towards Acton proper. From a modern standpoint what really stands out is the very generous amount of space given over to tarmac and car parking spaces, especially this close to a Crossrail hub, and you might therefore be able to guess what's coming next.
What's coming next is total redevelopment, indeed it's already started. The chunk of the Friary Park Estate closest to the station has already been demolished and replaced, or is in the process of being replaced, by much denser much taller stacks of apartments. Locals kicked up an enormousfuss when the developers proposed a 37 storey tower, and weren't much happier when it was cut to 24 but with an additional tower squeezed alongside. The latest kerfuffle is the Mayor's requirement that all buildings over 30m tall must be built with two staircases for reasons of fire safety, forcing a redesign that's slowed things down somewhat.
The new development has been branded The Verdean because a third of the site will be patches of interconnected green space. The marketing team have spewed considerable weaselfroth across all aspects the project, for example writing bolx like "step into a perfectly connected green haven" on the exterior hoardings. When they say "where the trees rustle in the breeze" they mean landscaped shrubbery and when they say "over the gentle hum of the city" they mean the A40 is very close by. Meanwhile the Verdean's website claims that "west London is where Royal history and refined culture meet village-like shopping and ample greenery", and the more of this tosh I read the more I'd like to forcibly relocate the authors to one of the affordable flats and bar them from the cinema and private rooftop gardens.
But what's much more interesting than Joseph Avenue's anodyne future is its chequered past. A manorhouse with medieval roots, originally owned by the Bishop of London, once stood on this precise site. It was called Friar's Place and by 1850 had evolved into "a beautiful villa with a balustraded terrace looking south over pleasure grounds." But it was demolished in 1902 and ten years later the derelict site was purchased by a west London sausage magnate called Thomas Wall. His staff were under-occupied in the summer, this not being peak season for meat-based snacks, so he'd decided to diversify into ice cream instead. You'll know his company best as Wall's.
The Acton site was named The Friary and its chilled products were dispatched on ‘Stop Me and Buy One’ tricycles selling large bricks, choc ices and tubs. Lollies were a later add-on. It took until 1956 for the sausage aspect to be relocated elsewhere allowing The Friary to focus solely on ice cream. Shortly afterwards Wall's opened a much more modern factory in Gloucester but production continued at Acton to keep up with snowballing demand. It's possible that Cornettos (1976) and Twisters (1982) were made here, but definitely not Soleros (1994) because by then The Friary had been transformed into Joseph Avenue. And even that won't exist in a couple of years' time so I suspect I made my Christmas visit just in time.
