Byline Festival at Acklam Village: where Portobello and the Westway meet at the heart of Notting Hill’s fraught history

Choosing a venue for a festival celebrating an eclectic combination of free speech, inquisitiveness, comedy and music was no easy feat. A sprawling countryside affair in years past, if Byline Festival was to squeeze itself within the confines of central London, the walls themselves had best be iconic. Acklam Village is such a place. At the crossroads of Portobello and the former Acklam Road, demolished in the early 1960s for the Westway flyover, it is a truly unique space, with a legacy as rich as the neighbourhood surrounding it. 

Built in the late 1860s and taking its name from the village of Acklam – today a suburb of Middlesbrough – Acklam Road started off as a typical working-class street but would eventually serve as a demarcation of wealth inequality in the area. To the south lay the affluent Notting Hill; to the west and north was the poverty-stricken Notting Dale, now known as North Kensington. Today a household name, the market on Portobello Road has humble beginnings as a local bourgeois food market. Rag-and-bone men, scavengers reselling unwanted household items, moved in from Notting Dale to sell their wares, those penetrating further southward into Notting Hill branding themselves ‘antique traders’. This branding contrast betrayed the disparity between the two communities. 

Notting Dale languished under the inequities of bigotry since the mid-19th century, when its residents suffered some of the lowest life expectancies and highest infant mortality rates in the country. Once known as the ‘Potteries and Piggeries’, the area was described by Charles Dickens in 1850 as “a plague spot scarcely equalled for its insalubrity by any other in London.” It is now home to the infamous Lancaster West Estate, a concrete jungle of council housing in the shadow of Grenfell Tower. 

Notting Hill became a microcosm of the struggle against class privilege and nativism. In the 1930s, the well-to-do were so grated by the influx of economic migrants during the Great Depression that they partitioned their properties into flatshares and fled to the shires. As Afro-Caribbean immigration to Britain increased in the 1950s, the youth subculture of white working-class ‘Teddy Boys’ complemented their distinguishable Edwardian dandy attire with animosity towards the newcomers. In 1957, the end of rent controls opened the floodgates for slum landlords. Resorting to all manner of abuses to drive out former tenants, properties would be divvied-up and stuffed with desperate and destitute migrants charged exorbitant rates.

Goaded by Oswald Mosley's fascistic ‘Union Movement’, the hostility of the ‘Teddy Boys’ came to a head on April 30th, 1958. Following a fracas outside Latimer Road Tube Station the night prior, mobs of up to four hundred armed ‘Teds’ stormed through Notting Hill screaming, “Keep Britain White!”, attacking every West Indian dwelling they came across. The Notting Hill Race Riots raged for five days. Although no one was killed, hundreds were wounded as the streets harkened back to the Blitz. Police dismissed assertions that the attacks were racially motivated, instead framing events as hooliganism from both sides.

 In a bid to heal the scars of racism, in 1959, Trinidadian-born activist and editor of The West Indian Gazette Claudia Jones organised a ‘Caribbean Carnival’: Notting Hill Carnival was born, now one of the biggest in the world, and has endured in spite of repeated scrapping attempts by the council at the behest of wealthy proprietors. The same year, however, Mosley ran for the Kensington North parliamentary seat, campaigning on forced repatriation of anyone originally from the Caribbean and a total ban on mixed marriages, and gained an 8.1% share of the vote.

By 1962 the rich desperately needed a faster escape route to the greenbelt, and plans to erect a 2.5-mile elevated section of the A40(M) were greenlit. Thousands of compulsory purchase orders were issued and swathes of Notting Dale, including the length and breadth of Acklam Road, were razed. Many whose houses weren’t purchased later suffered extreme pulmonary disorders due to the dust and pollution caused by living on a construction site for nearly eight years. A tight-knit community was torn in two and approximately 5000 families lost their homes for each mile of the flyover. The North Kensington Amenity Trust, now the Westway Trust, was established to manage the 23 acres of derelict land created below, dividing the space into numbered bays.

 The legendary music venue ‘Acklam Hall’ opened in bay 63 in 1975 with a gig by Joe Strummer’s pre-Clash group the 101’ers. The Clash’s eponymous debut album sleeve features a photo of a police charge during the 1976 Carnival at the corner of Portobello and Acklam. Van Morrison’s ‘The Bright Side of the Street’ single featured an illustration of Acklam Road on the cover. In the mid-1980’s, the Acklam Youth Club basketball court in bay 58 was transformed into a graffiti art gallery and venue for hip-hop jams and break dancing. In 2010, the Portobello Pop Up Cinema set up shop in bay 56, becoming a mainstay for the Portobello Film Festival. Celebrating its 10th anniversary this month, Acklam Village opened in 2011 in bays 57 and 58. Founded as a farmer’s market, it evolved into a live music venue and international street food market, cherishing the heritage of Portobello and the diversity of Notting Hill. 

On June 14th, 2017, when the Grenfell Tower fire claimed 72 lives, the Westway 23 community action group used bay 56 as a supplies centre. For the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea council, Grenfell stood out like a sore thumb in the middle of an area boasting some of the highest property prices in Britain. Echoing the callous landlords of old, the council had long tried to rehouse its working-class and ethnic minority residents with tempting offers of flats outside London. Complaints about the lack of fire extinguishers, sprinklers and accessible exits were ignored, to their eternal shame.

Nowadays, Notting Hill is famed both for its multiculturalism as well as its reputation as “the most unequal place in Britain.” It is this analysis that Nova seeks to address. Based on the corner opposite Acklam Village, since 1983 the charity has been challenging and exposing structural inequality by empowering the local community through learning. 

Byline Festival is proud to be the latest entry into the history book of the area, and proud to be partnering with Nova to help heal the wounds of pages past.