INTRODUCTION
(1923)
The other day found me in a part of London once familiar, now rarely visited. This is Notting Hill Gate or, as I believe it now prefers to be called, Holland Park. You get to it by taking an omnibus running westward along Oxford Street; you pass the big dressmakers' and milliners' shops, you pass by Marble Arch, noting, if your eyes are keen, a small brass triangle let into the middle of the roadway, marking the site of Hadley Newgreen or Tyburn Tree, you have the Park and afterwards Kensington Gardens on your left and a prosperous residential quarter on your right, and so you come at length to Notting Hill Gate, named, no doubt, after the toll gate that once stood there. It is not a very characteristic neighbourhood; shops and taverns mostly of the 'fifties and 'sixties of the last century, dingy and undistinguished enough; here and there a couple of
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