@ Matilda Egere-Cooper 2017
- Start at Notting Hill Gate (where the tube is).
- Walk up Pembridge Villas as though you’re going to Portobello Road.
- Push smugly past the tourists as you don’t take the same route as them.
- Carry on bending to the left until you get to Chepstow Crescent on your left.
- Take this road, carry on into Ledbury Road (turn right).
- Walk down through the heart of monied Notting Hill but notice how young most of the roadside trees are, reminding you how recently its gentrification took place.
- Take a left into Colville Terrace and walk round Powis Square – the location for Donald Cammell’s sinister 60s cult film, Performance. There’s something bowl-like about the Notting Hill basin which goes well with the idea of getting lost, physically or morally (no high ground from which to see your way over the dirtly wedding cake houses).
- When you get to Powis Square you might feel you have reached the bottom of the world. But if you go down Powis Terrace by The Tabernacle on the far side of the square, then take a right onto Westbourne Park Road, after 5-10 minutes’ walking you will get out of the labyrinth and reach the splendid Idler Academy where you can stop for coffee, a class in something, or some highly interesting casual conversation.
- The Idler is on the way to the high ground of Westbourne Park tube where the streets stop circling and you begin to feel you know where you are again. The Academy represents reason but, situated as it is on the south side of the West Way, it’s still steeped in that disorienting Notting Hill feeling – a combination of which proprietor and editor of The Idler Magazine, Tom Hodgkinson, would – I think – approve.
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