TOM
VAGUE’S HOLLYWOOD BABYLON W11
INTRO
1 NOTTING HILL
IN BYGONE DAYS
2 NOTTING HELL/HEAVEN
W11
3 SYMPATHY FOR
THE DEVIL
4 HOUSES OF THE
UNHOLY
5 ONE FOOT IN
THE GROVE
6 MIDDLE EARTH
W11
7 THINGS LOOK
GREAT IN NOTTING HILL GATE, WE ALL SIT AROUND AND MEDITATE
8 HOUSES OF THE
UNHOLY REVISITED
INTRO
London psychogeographer Tom
Vague conjures up the magic, mysticism and mythology
of Notting Hill past on a magical mystery tour of Hollywood
Babylon W11.
Once upon a time there was a place called Notting Hill
Gate, that wasn’t inhabited by international bankers
and TV executives, where anything could happen and usually
did. But, in spite of gentrification and media overkill,
some magical vestiges remain and not all the ghosts
of the area’s weird and wonderful past are banished
from the streets.
Notting Hill: The Magical City ‘In Notting Hill
Gate in London, or it might be Greenwich Village in
New York, the unreasonable city has come to the point
where it cannot be ignored by even the civic authorities.
The streets around Ladbroke Grove, with their architecture
of white candy stucco, are warrens of eccentric privateness;
they are occupied by people who have taken no part in
the hypothetical consensus of urban life…
‘Here magic flourishes, and every-where one can
see evidence of a growing devout irrationalism. Little
bookshops sell the I-Ching, packs of tarot cards and
fat studies of the obscure mathematics of astrology.
You can buy Sufi watergongs to aid contemplation and
the macrobiotic foodshop on Portobello Road, Ceres,
even turns the consumption of vegetables into a mystical
religion…
‘It is the same consoling message that the Situationists
and the Hare Krishna people preach; believe it, and
the city, with all its paradoxes, puzzles and violent
inequities, will float away before your eyes, a chimera
to delude only the hopelessly, cynically earthbound…
Notting Hill Gate is a superstitious place because it
seems to exceed rational prescriptions and explanations…
‘The people who float on the tide of metaphysical
junk – freaks of all kinds… into macrobiotics,
yoga, astrology, illiterate mysticism, acid, terrible
poetry by Leonard Cohen and tiny novels by Richard Brautigan
– have managed, at a price. The new folk magic
of the streets promises to have some unhappy political
consequences but as a way of responding to the city
it does reflect a truth about the nature of the place
which we had better learn to confront…
‘These people at the Gate have clearly embraced
the idea of a magical city. Their clothes, their language,
their religious beliefs, their folk art belong to a
synthetically-reconstructed tribal culture ruled by
superstition, totems and taboos…
‘The Gate opens not on to the gentle pot smoking
whimsy of Gandalf’s Garden, but on a ruined Eden,
tangled, exotic and overgrown, where people see signs
in scraps of junk and motley. It may look like affectation,
a boasting juvenile pretence, but perhaps it is real
– a state of natural magic to which the fragmented
industrial city unconsciously aspires.’
Notting Hill in the hippy days described as a prime
example of ‘The Magical City’ in Jonathan
Raban’s 1974 ‘psychological handbook for
urban survival’, Soft City.
1
NOTTING HILL IN BYGONE DAYS
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