Notting Hill is one of the most architecturally mixed parts of London. Walk from Westbourne Grove to Ladbroke Grove and you'll pass Georgian terraces, Victorian townhouses, hidden mews that were once stables, post-war social housing and the odd modernist insertion, often within a few hundred metres. That mix is the interesting thing about the area, and it has a fair amount to say about how we should be building now.
Trellick Tower, Ernő Goldfinger's 1972 Brutalist landmark, rising over North Kensington. RISE Design Studio.
Architecture here has never stood still. Georgian terraces were extended, Victorian shells reworked, modernist buildings dropped in among them. What's striking isn't that any of it is perfect, it's that the buildings have stayed useful by changing. That's close to what we mean by sustainable design: reuse what's already there, choose materials that age well, and treat the marks of time as part of the building rather than something to strip out.
Each period left its mark, from the pale classical lines of St Peter's Church to the sculptural concrete of the twentieth century. The result holds together precisely because it was never planned as a single thing.
The communal garden squares here were laid out nearly two centuries ago, and they now do a second job as green corridors for wildlife. The stucco terraces that once ran on coal fires are quietly being upgraded with heat pumps, solar panels and breathable natural materials. None of this is at odds with the area's character. Retrofit, adaptive reuse and low-embodied-carbon materials aren't a passing fashion. They're a continuation of what Notting Hill has always done, which is find new uses for good buildings.
When we retrofit a Victorian townhouse or rework a mews, we're not only improving the fabric and the insulation. We're keeping a building in use, which is almost always the lower-carbon option compared with demolition and rebuild.
This part of London also holds harder memories, and it would be glib to write about its architecture without acknowledging that. For a practice whose work is mostly about fabric, it's a sober reminder that how a building looks tells you very little about how it's built or how it performs. The things that matter most, the construction, the safety and the way a building behaves over decades, are usually the ones you can't see from the pavement. That's the part of the job we take most seriously.
Progress here has rarely meant starting over. It's meant starting again, carefully, with what's already standing. As London deals with climate change and density, that's a useful model: keep good buildings, make them perform, and add to them honestly rather than erasing and rebuilding.
If you're thinking about reworking a house in Notting Hill, or anywhere with this kind of history, the first question is usually the same: what's worth keeping, and how do we make it work harder. We'd be glad to talk it through.
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