I've just been looking at a slide pack of photos of old Notting Hill.

Amazing does n't begin to catch it. The pocket of Notting Hill I call home is unrecognisable to what it once was. Totally. Like it's been carpet bombed, not once, or even twice, but repeatedly, and finally what remained, the dust, the broken walls, collapsed ceilings, shattered window frames, all of it stirred in some great blender and dumped back out. Not even the street patterns are the same.

So many shops too. We are vastly under-resourced today when it comes to the small shops, there's barely anything, stumps of teeth in a nearly empty mouth as it were. Then, and by the way, then is indefinable, I can't say the fifties, or the sixties, the set of photos, I've been privileged to see cover almost a century, the seams of the neighbourhood were almost popping, at breaking point, with places to shop.

Notting Hill teemed with life, oozed it, spilled on the streets and over on to the roads. It's like the Lower East Side must have been in the 1890s and early twentieth century. Not an inch of space.

I have a very good historical sense as I do an active imagination; even with those two attributes, I still find it close to impossible to picture in my mind how Notting Hill once looked, how it breathed with life. God, it must have been like Naples, people hanging out of windows, in vests, playing on the streets, loitering, walking, shopping, singing, drunk.