4 St Luke's Road, W11

Before its gentrification by Bohemian media darlings, Notting Hill in the Fifties and Sixties was bedsit-land – streets of crumbling, under-maintained hotels run by absentee landlords. In the Fifties, the first wave of West Indian immigrants, invited by the government to help rebuild Britain after the war, settled here.

The area became the site of race riots, dramatised in Julien Temple’s extended pop promo Absolute Beginners (which recreated Fifties Notting Hill on the backlot at Shepperton Studios). Its low-rent bedsits supplied the scruffy, flaking backdrop to the new wave of socially concerned dramas, typical of which is Bryan Forbes’ 1962 The L-Shaped Room. In the film, French actress Leslie Caron (the movie needed a big international star) shares a rundown house with cohabitees representing a daring compendium of Sixties issues: Brock Peters (race), Patricia Phoenix (prostitution) and Cicely Courtneidge (lesbianism), while Caron herself is in town for an abortion. The bedsit on the fictitious ‘Brockash Road’ was 4 St Luke’s Road at Westbourne Park Road.

Immediately to the right of number 4 is the arch of the cobbled St Luke’s Mews. It’s here that Bill Murray gets mugged, all the while assuming it”s all part of the ‘Theatre of Life’ experience, in Jon Amiel’s comedy thriller The Man Who Knew Too Little. To the right of the mews, 6 St Luke’s Road became ‘6 Bishop’s Mews’, where Murray first encounters Joanne Whalley in her fetching French maid outfit in the same movie.

St Luke's Mews is where lovelorn Mark (Andrew Lincoln) silently professes his adoration of Juliet (Keira Knightly) with hand-written cards in Love Actually. Oh, put those hankies away...

Trivia: St Luke’s Mews is also home to Sunny (Sienna Guillory) in Alex Jovy’s Sorted. And, yes, it is true what the characters say, this is the mews where TV presenter Paula Yates lived and died.

The L-Shaped Room (1962, dir: Bryan Forbes)
Love Actually (2003, dir: Richard Curtis)
The Man Who Knew Too Little (1997, dir: Jon Amiel)
Sorted (2000, dir: Alex Jovy)