Westbourne Grove

There are a number of popular shopping destinations located on Westbourne Grove and adjoining streets, pre-eminently: Portobello Market, Queensway and Ledbury Road.

It was here that Madonna headed during breaks in filming "Evita" - to the funky boutiques, the avant-garde florists, the designer jewellery and futuristic furniture (at millennial prices)."

Upon lease expiry, rents increased significantly and pricing-out many incumbent family businesses, which were replaced by fashionable / prestige restaurants and shops.

[citation needed] The development of Westbourne Grove began in the 1840s and proceeded from the east (which lay in Bayswater) to the west, where it became the principal east–west artery into the Ladbroke Estate.

Amongst the well-known residents of this house were Sir William Yorke, baronet; the Venetian ambassador; the architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell (a great great nephew of the diarist Samuel Pepys); and the General Commander in Chief of the Army, Viscount Hill, who left in 1836 (and who gave his name to the modern road bridge north of Westbourne Grove called Lord Hill's Bridge).

He replaced them—in what had become overcrowded multi-occupied housing—mainly with recent migrants from the West Indies who, because of discrimination and council tenant restrictions, could not find accommodation.

John Lanchester, in The Guardian (6 January 2012), observed Westbourne Grove to be "an area that in the last couple of decades has gone from slightly rough to full-on trustafarian to total bankerisation.