People of Norland

Janis Hughes

Janis Hughes loves to travel and during this lockdown stasis it was good to hear her tales of adventure and derring-do. Early on she went to Ravensbourne Art School, now university, near Greenwich and for awhile made her way painting greeting cards in her rented Primrose Hill flat, which cost her a princely £9/week in 1968 until she moved to a hippy boat on the Thames.  

In the early 1970s, she was shopping in Brixton Market and was naturally drawn to a stall selling old things. She bought five jet beaded Victorian collars for 50p each and resold them to a Camden Passage shop for more than £4 each. “That’s when I realised I obviously had an eye,” says Janis, and having collected enough antique clothing she set up a stall on Portobello Road. “Then I met someone who had a shop, Sunset Boulevard, and I became a partner,” she says, “We were so popular we had to make people queue outside on Portobello Road. We made quite good money.”

On a visit home to her parents one weekend her mother took her to a rag yard she had discovered in Taunton. “They had loads of stuff and no one to buy it. I remember a beautiful pale pink ostrich feather coat,” she says wistfully. “My mother would go every week to buy clothes for me to sell.” The Portobello shop was so successful Janis and her partner opened a new shop in the antique emporium Antiquarius in the Kings Road. Sir Mick Jagger bought clothes there and other stars including Sir Elton John, Bob Geldof and Barbra Streisand were also regulars. (Like the chain store AllSaints takeover of Portobello’s Lipka's Antiques Arcade, where more than 150 traders made a living, Antiquarius is now a US chain store Anthropologie).

“I was feeling restless. There was an American shop girl there and she said ‘come over to Malibu’. I fell in love with it. I took the Greyhound bus along Route 66 from New York to LA. From there I met another lady from Ibiza.” Janis returned to the UK to tell her mother there was a change of plan and she was off to Ibiza. Days later a clothes parcel from her mother arrived for her to sell.

From Ibiza Janis hit the road again, this time heading to Australia, where she lived for nine years. Her decision to fly to Australia was partly based the romantic idea of following in the footsteps of her grandmother, who had travelled there for the 1800s Gold Rush. Settling in Adelaide, she first imported tweed from the same Scottish mill used by Chanel and later started a magazine.

After a life of adventure, Janis returned to the UK with nothing and, after a few months couch surfing with friends, went to Kensington and Chelsea council to ask if they could help her. She was given the number of the Sheppard Trust, an almshouse charity started by Elizabeth Sheppard in 1855. “Sheppard was left a lot of money and wanted to help the poor,” explains Janis. Over a twenty year period from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s it bought properties in Holland Park. Three Lansdowne Walk houses were bought by the Trust in the 1950s and in the 1970s were converted into 30 flats for ‘ladies over the age of 65 and of a Christian faith, who are in need, hardship or distress’. Now, 74 year old Janis lives happily in that small community on Ladbroke Road.  Janis reflects: “I have been so lucky in life.” 

Margy Kinmonth

Born and bred in Norland’s Ladbroke Road, the film director Margy Kinmonth has gone on to make over 40 award winning films. She is currently directing one about the British war artist Eric Ravilious, for his 80th Anniversary. She made time to speak to Norland Noticeboard before heading to the south coast to do more filming.

During lockdown Margy’s filming was stopped while waiting for her team to be able to work on the film again, so during all three lockdowns and in between she has been recording the pandemic year’s unfolding events in watercolour, in a drawing book given to her by her daughter. She has become a lockdown painter. It started with paintings of people queueing at Notting Hill Gate. “It was like 1984,” she says, “People were beginning to wear masks and everything being closed. A bit like [French impressionist] Seurat’s paintings, with everyone social distancing”

Margy still lives in the area, just off Ladbroke Grove. “It has been interesting to see the changes,” she says, "When I was a child, from my bedroom window I could see the church at the top of the hill and hear the factory hooter. We would never go too far up Ladbroke Grove (70 Ladbroke Grove was the limit) as it was poor and also dangerous. In the 70s cars were burnt.” We are sitting at St John’s Cafe, and when she was young Margy sang in the St John’s church choir along with the late politician Tony Benn's family and Georgina von Eztdorf. It was an exciting time in Notting Hill, Margy moved into a house in Elgin Crescent previously rented by new wave musician Adam Ant, and Island Records had turned a church in Basing Street off Portobello Road into a recording studio. Bob Marley, Van Morrison and the Beatles hung out in local bars.

At the time Margy wanted to be a war photographer and had dramatic photo coverage of her neighbour’s Elgin Crescent house on fire on the front page of the Kensington Post. She was working at the Electric Cinema on Portobello Road as a projectionist and found that she was “already obsessed with making films.” She also worked as projectionist at 20th Century Fox and Studio1 on Oxford Street while studying painting at the academic Byam Shaw School of Art, a beautiful building in Campden Street which now contains the ubiquitous luxury flats.

After a stint welding huge sculptures at Bath Academy of Art, she entered the world of film making via television adverts. She then moved to Granada TV in Manchester to research, write and direct current affairs programmes and then worked as a freelance director for BBC, ITV and MTV. Among her many accolades, Margy won the 1991 BAFTA Best Documentary Series for Naked Hollywood.

Currently Margy is directing art and culture documentaries for Foxtrot Films, an independent film and television company she co-founded 1981, and which she now owns with the film producer Maureen Murray. foxtrotfilms Recent films include Royal Paintbox, which reveals rarely seen artworks by members of the Royal Family and interviews with HRH the Prince of Wales, BAFTA-nominated War Art with Eddie Redmayne, and Hermitage Revealed, a behind the scenes look at one of the largest and oldest museums in the world.

Clive Wilson

Arriving to live in St James's Square in 1966, Clive and his wife Catherine found an area that had seen better days. At the time there were no railings around the now-restored houses, the iron having been taken to make guns for World War II. The railings had been removed from round the square communal gardens too, and replaced with a rusty chain link fence. Clive says: “Cornices were falling into the street. One house, number 9, had to be barricaded off.” Early on Clive realised what an exceptional area he had come to live in, even if it had fallen on hard times. War damage still pervaded, due to shortage of materials and lack of funds. But a distinguished late Regency/early Victorian layout, with many fine houses, needed rescuing and restoring after the slash-and-burn approach to redevelopment of the early 1960's. Moreover for Clive, a major irritation was up to 600 vehicles an hour, including lorries and buses, roaring past his door in St James’ Gardens, up through Clarendon Cross and Clarendon Road, finding their way from the recently built M4 and the M1. Something had to be done to get rid of them.

Clive consulted Gordon Michell, an architect on Queensdale Road, who was a pioneer of conservation in towns. Gordon told him the council had just been required to designate Conservation Areas, and didn't know what to do with them: no conservation ideas, aims, let alone policies. Gordon suggested that the designation of Norland as ‘an outstanding Conservation Area’ gave an opportunity to rescue and restore the area, and get rid of the traffic as part of this effort, helping the Council to understand what a Conservation Area should be about, and develop policies to rescue the area. Thus  was started the Norland Conservation Society (NCS) in 1969, architect Gordon Michell as chairman, and another local friend Ian Tegner as founding treasurer. Clive ran the Norland Conservation Society for 50 years, finally handing over the reins to Libby Kinmonth in 2019.

One of the first, and most significant achievements of NCS was the closure of Clarendon Cross. Once Clarendon Cross was closed, through traffic was closed off and peace came to this enclave of London. This coincided with the opening of the West Cross Route and Western avenue extension, which meant through traffic no longer needed to find a rat-run through Norland. 

After that, successive NCS Committees wrestled with the many pressures of defending a historic area against the demands of  increasingly prosperous and well-heeled owners, all the time trying to develop consistent and defensible conservation policies. In this process, a significant mile-stone came with European Architectural Heritage Year, headed up by Gordon Michell, which supported getting all the Royal Crescent houses painted a uniform colour. “That was a great achievement,” says Clive.

A more recent significant achievement of the NCS was the development, and adoption by referendum, of the Norland Neighbourhood Plan,  the first in London and the second in the whole country: “We were the first to get a Neighbourhood Plan endorsed by  referendum,” says Clive, “we got recognition and authority countrywide."

When Clive arrived in Norland, he was working in marketing with a major fibres/textiles/chemicals group, Courtaulds, and travelled widely for his work, to Sweden, South Africa, USA, France and Germany. Everywhere he went he took his easy-to-carry watercolours and created a huge portfolio of artwork. When he returned to Norland, he painted houses in the area. Later on, early retirement enabled him to develop his painting career, and he continues to paint and take commissions.

The NCS goes from strength to strength,  with a regularly updated website with a history of the Norland Estate, which runs from Royal Crescent to the west, and includes Norland Square, Portland Road and St James's Gardens. There is a fascinating interview with Meriel and Ian Tegner, who lived in Norland in the 1960s, on the NCS website. They moved to 44 Norland Square, which was divided into flats, in 1961. The top floor was occupied by a blonde prostitute whose clients would queue up along the chicken wire fence of the Square gardens The interview by Catherine Wilson is here …norlandconservationsociety