The 12-mile Western Avenue from White City Stadium to Denham was conceived as a fast exit from London before the First World War. Built in stages between 1920 and 1943, it balanced the Eastern Avenue on the other side of the city. 

As traffic increased, it became apparent that the road had one major drawback; it was too short. Instead of whisking cars and lorries at motorway speed into the heart of London, it dumped them unceremoniously at White City with three miles still to go to Marble Arch. Huge bottlenecks built up at Shepherds Bush just south of White City. Traffic then moved in a slow crawl along Holland Park Avenue and Bayswater Road. In their frustration, many drivers tried to find a way through the residential streets of Notting Hill. Accidents, pollution and congestion were the inevitable consequences. A solution to the problem had been proposed in the 1930s; an extension linking Western Avenue with the Marylebone Road would provide an easy, fast access to the City and West End and could follow the established artery of the Metropolitan railway line between Paddington and Latimer Road.

 

War then post-war austerity intervened and plans were put aside. By the late 1950s the economic situation was more favourable. Reform and modernisation were in the air and the need for the road was greater than ever. The Western Avenue extension, or Westway as it became known, was finally approved in the form of an urban motorway that was to straddle the inner city on huge concrete stilts. 

Site clearance began in 1964, involving the demolition of hundreds of houses. From 1966, four years of continuous construction work followed on what was then the biggest road building scheme ever undertaken in London. During that time the central swathe of North Kensington and Paddington was little more than a vast building site. Continuous noise and dirt from heavy lorries and machinery became a familiar and unwelcome part of life. The road finally opened to traffic in July 1970. Minor works and cleaning up were completed a year later. 

In engineering terms, the new road was a triumph. Its two and a half miles made it the longest stretch of elevated motorway in Europe and incorporated all sorts of advanced features from electric heating on gradients to special vibration-absorbing joints. Though the cost doubled during building to £33 million, the road appeared to fulfil the function for which it had been designed; within a few months of opening, 47,000 vehicles a day were cruising over the roof tops of North Kensington and Paddington, taking only a few minutes to cover ground which previously took an hour of valuable commercial time. Though some claimed the effect of the new road was to transfer the Shepherd's Bush jam to Marylebone Road, it seemed to offer a solution to the problem of traffic congestion in urban areas. It had been intended as one of the main radial arms linking central London with an Inner Motorway Box, part of Greater London Council’s ambitious plans to run three concentric highway belts around London. The Box scheme was shelved in the 70s, leaving the half-mile M41, connecting the Westway roundabout with Shepherd's Bush, as its only monument. 

"There was a terrible noise for weeks when they were pile-driving. They started at six o'clock in the morning - sometimes it went on all night. You think the whole city is being bombarded beneath you." – Eileen Wright, resident of Latimer Road, which was severed by the new highway.

In terms of people and communities, the elevated motorway was a disaster. Planned before the revolutionary Buchanan report of 1963, which called for new road schemes to take social and environmental factors into account, no attempt had been made to integrate it with the area through which it passed. The route was marked out on the map, the way cleared, and the road built. If an end of a street or a block got in the way, it was chopped, leaving houses in some cases less than 20 feet from passing traffic, their luckless inhabitants unable to claim compensation. As for the land left derelict under the motorway, the planners had given no thought to restoring it to local use. 

At the official opening of the Western Avenue extension in July 1970, local residents expressed their feelings. Shouts of 'Philistine!' and 'Get us re-housed now!' met the arrival of Michael Heseltine, Parliamentary Secretary at the Transport Ministry. Arriving by lorry the wrong way up an 'unopened' slip road and evading a police block, protesters from Walmer Road and Pamber Street advanced down the motorway causing total confusion among the procession of official cars. Some sang 'uncomplimentary songs, especially composed for the occasion', according to the Kensington Post. The ministerial cavalcade later drove the length of the twin dual-carriageway, stopping opposite a row of three-storey terraced houses in Acklam Road, North Kensington, where residents had hung, 'Get us out of this Hell- Re-house Us Now' on a huge banner outside their windows. It took residents and housing action groups up to two years of protracted lobbying and wrangling with the Greater London Council before all those most immediately affected by the motorway were eventually re-housed. 

“Was anyone surprised when North Kensington gave a collective (and not always figurative) two-fingers sign to its £30 million motorway on Tuesday?', commented the Kensington Post three days after the opening. 'It is tragic that the energies, the talents and the involvement that North Kensingtonians can give are having to be squandered once again - in fighting to preserve basic human dignities instead of working towards an exciting new environment. Acklam Road's problems will be sorted out after the usual sequence of threats, accusations, pleas, promises and delays. But will the authorities learn this time that North Kensington is determined to shape its own environment?” 

"The social and physical fabric of this twilight area is inadequate in every way. The houses are old and decayed, the area is densely populated and there is limited provision for children to play. Poverty is a conspicuous problem with large families living on low incomes and paying high rents." – Kensington and Chelsea Planning Committee report, 1968. 

The energies and skills of North Kensington had grown during a decade of determined community activity in the 60s. This new style of action was imaginative and effective in goading dilatory authorities to start tackling the atrocious conditions. North Kensington, the predominantly working class area of the borough of Kensington (and, following local government re-organisation in 1964, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea), showed the classic symptoms of inner city decay. 

Years of neglect by private landlords meant that by the 40s, when Christie the murderer was living in Notting Hill, much of the area had degenerated into a seedy, depressing slum characterised by leaking roofs, rotten windows, damp basements, outdoor wash-houses and privies, peeling paint and cracked stucco. The Rent Act of 1957 decontrolled rents without giving security of tenure. Unscrupulous landlords and their agents, like the notorious Peter Rachman, put up rents, neglected essential repairs, used intimidation to force tenants to vacate property and let out one and two room units to whole families. Newly arrived immigrants from the West Indies, needing to live near to central London for work in the service industries, were charged exorbitant rents. In the summer of 1958 white gangs roamed the streets of Notting Hill attacking black people and their property. 

"We had it very difficult with racialness when we came here. If you wanted somewhere to live you would go to somewhere to let. As soon as they saw that you were black they shut the door in your face. On the bus when we sit beside the English people they pull up themself from us as if they scorn us.” – Florence Ellis, local resident. 

The first of their kind in Britain, the riots caught the headlines and drew public attention to the area for the first time. The Mayor set up a committee to examine how race relations could be improved. The North Kensington Family Study, funded by the City Parochial Foundation, was set up to investigate the social and housing conditions which gave rise to the riots. Pearl Jephcott's book, 'A Troubled Area. Notes on Notting Hill' (1964), based on this study, provided seed-corn for many later reports and action programmes. The Methodist Church, with strong links in the West Indies, sent in three young ministers to build a multi-racial congregation. The Group Ministry which they formed started the Notting Hill Social Council in 1960, a forum where clergy, community and social workers met to pool perceptions and plan action on housing, infant welfare and the needs of disaffected young people. Bruce Kenrick, a Presbyterian minister who went on to start Shelter, the national campaign for the homeless, setup the Notting Hill Housing Trust in 1963. 

Although some initiatives were successful, Notting Hill's problems - racial tension aggravated by fascists (in 1959 Oswald Mosley had stood for Parliament in North Kensington), bad housing, overcrowding and lack of safe, traffic-free areas for children to play-needed to be tackled in a different way. A survey of the area's housing undertaken by the Notting Hill Summer Project of 1967 documented the intense pressure on living space in North Kensington. Population density was twice that of the borough as a whole and one of the highest in London. Nearly half the children lived in overcrowded conditions. Three quarters of all households lacked an adequate number of bedrooms. The Royal Borough had the lowest number of council houses in London. Three quarters of all households lived in privately rented accommodation. In the Golborne & Colville wards, now facing either side of the new elevated motorway, 70% of households were living in multi-occupied accommodation and either shared or had no access to a bath or shower. 

The Council had yet to develop a firm policy on private landlords. Though prepared to fund housing associations to develop a non-profit housing sector, it was sparing in using its powers when it came to the private sector. It showed little concern for improving the amenities of the neglected northern part of the borough which provided such a stark contrast to the pleasant leafy avenues in the south. The lack of urgency was seen by North Kensington as the indifference of the better-off part of the borough whose Conservative majority always dominated the Council. 

"North Kensington is a running sore on the rich fleshy arse of South Kensington. The Council wants to forget that it is there. We must ensure that it hurts; that the longer the Council sits on it the more it will hurt. And that if it is not healed it will infect the whole body of the Borough." – From The Hustler, a radical black broadsheet, July 1968. 

Community Action

Community activists began taking a different, grass-roots approach to forcing the changes required. Tenants' associations successfully pressured landlords to open up private communal gardens as children's play areas. Alliances and networks were developed. The Notting Hill Community Workshop, started in 1965, played a leading part in the growing network of New Left socialist centres aiming to help local people 'fight to wrest from the authorities whatever they decide their community requires'. The London Free School, based on the American idea of self-organised learning for adults, set up classes on housing and immigration. It opened a neighbourhood advice centre, helped to organise the first Notting Hill Carnival in August 1966 and developed an adventure playground on part of the land cleared for the construction of the new motorway. In 1967 the Notting Hill People's Association was formed in response to the collapse of Henry Bowen Davies' £8 million property empire, with over 40 residential premises and a number of businesses in North Kensington. The Association's aims were to improve living conditions for tenants, fight exploitation and discrimination and provide play space and recreational facilities for children. 

In the same year, the Community Workshop initiated the Notting Hill Summer Project. Conceived by ex-CND campaigner George Clarke and organised by a coalition of churches and local groups, it was carried out by local people alongside 100 student volunteers drawn from colleges and universities all over England. The Project started a register of North Kensington's 11,000 houses, set up three neighbourhood centres staffed by volunteers, including lawyers and social workers, and established new play areas for local children. The work was to have a lasting influence. The register was continued and, when its Interim Report was published in 1969, made a national as well as a local impact. North Kensington Law Centre, the first neighbourhood law centre in the country, grew out of legal advice sessions held at All Saints Church hall. And a Housing Service, set up in 1968 as a result of the survey, led to the country's first Housing Action Centre getting established – under the Westway motorway. The late 60s and early 70s saw North Kensington successfully confronting landlords, squatting empty houses, liberating private communal gardens, marching on the Town Hall and forcing changes and about-turns in Council policy. It was these action networks that were to sustain the campaign which eventually persuaded the Council and the Greater London Council to take the unprecedented step of handing over the land under the motorway for community use.