Revisiting Notting Hill

Written by Amy Lee 

A rotating cast of old friends have stayed at my place during their travels in London ever since I first came here to study. One of the patterns I noticed in these visits is that most of my visitors pull out Roger Mitchell’s Notting Hill in preparation for visiting Notting Hill. After my latest visitor once again proved this observation, I decided it was high time I revisited the much-loved film myself. A headliner for holiday season movie marathons back home, Notting Hill has all the cliches that an audience can expect in a British rom-com: the awkward Englishman, memorable one-liners, and a perfect happy ending. It is a classic Richard Curtis screenplay, alongside other holiday favourites like Love Actually and About Time.  

In this revisit of Notting Hill, I had three years of living in a London flat under my belt and found myself lingering on the scenes of domestic spaces surrounding Will and his friends throughout the film. London, specifically West London, is designed to act as an intrinsic part of the character of Will (Hugh Grant), his peaceful lifestyle, and contrast him to Anna (Julia Roberts), who was from the most public and exposed of places: Hollywood.  

The film opens with a line that reflects this sentiment from Will:  

‘Of course I’ve seen her (Anna’s) films, and always thought she was, well, fabulous, but you know, a million, million miles from the world I live in. Which is here, Notting Hill. My favourite bit of London.’  

Will’s neighbourhood area in Notting Hill and his flat are, as the character says, ‘his world’. The opening montage through Will’s world of Notting Hill’s market stalls establishes the area as a place of homely clutter and kitschy paraphernalia.

The sequence starts with lines of busy weekend stalls on Portobello Road that dissolves into scenes of amusing and rather horrifying daily mishaps. The local hair salon has turned someone into a cartoon character (not in a good way), and another has drunkenly gotten a tattoo reading ‘I love Ken’.  

A screenshot taken during one of these dissolving transitions in the sequence produced this interesting photomontage below. Decades ago, in the visually oversaturated cities of the Weimar Republic, photomontages aptly expressed an explosion of viewpoints in the perception of urban space. A similar effect rings true in this accidental shot. Capturing the moment when the film overlays the jolly commercial clutter of the streets onto the visage of the flats lining them, it paints a humorous image of the Notting Hill that Will has claimed as his own. 

After accomplishing his mission of introducing the audience to his favourite part of the city, Will takes them from the streets and into the hyper-realistic interior of his home. Years of student-living in London have made me appreciate the level of detail in Will’s flat. The burnt-off ironing board, random cardboard boxes and vinyl bags, receipts, prints tacked onto furniture, and groceries litter every available surface in this single shot. It’s a meticulous orchestration of the lived-in mess in your flat that you would not want people to see. Especially your visiting mother or your significant other, at least early in the relationship.  

All jokes aside, Will’s flat is an almost embarrassingly private space that reveals its inhabitant’s recent activities and lifestyle. Will’s flat design contrasts most sharply with shots of Anna’s suite at the Ritz hotel. Anna’s golden room is a display of lavish extravagance and manicured flowers, all perfectly colour coordinated. The room expresses wealth beyond imagination, but also betrays the lack of private life and the constant publicity that defines Anna’s world.  

Throughout the film, Will and Anna inhabit these contrasting domains, and constantly visit each other’s spaces - one deeply private, and one astoundingly public. The contrasting spatial situations means that one cannot truly be at home in the other, apparent from how each visit ends in disaster: betrayal of trust for Will and a public scandal for Anna. Their ultimate happily ever after and future happens in, surprise of all surprises, a neutral zone.  

Where does the film stake out as the neutral zone for the couple? The audience is granted a view into a such a promising candidate around the middle of the film. This is in a wealthier residential neighbourhood of Notting Hill where Will’s friends Bella and Max live: the semi-detached house and the private square that were filmed around Elgin Crescent and Rosemead Garden.  

This part of Notting Hill features the cozy domesticity of Bella and Max’s house, as the friends gather around a round table to enjoy some good food and wine. The dinner scene in the couple’s kitchen is a mix of the homely clutter and paraphernalia from Will’s world at Portobello Road, and the healthy relationships and care that were lacking in Anna’s public life.  

Then, their spontaneous escape to Rosemead Garden grants Will and Anna a moment of ultimate privacy in a semi-public space. In a little pocket of space tucked away from buildings and commercial objects, away from home but also away from the public, Rosemead Gardens provides the characters with a neutral zone that frees them from their respective territories and allows them to be quite anonymous for a while. 

Following Will and Anna around Notting Hill’s domestic spaces proved to be an interesting venture. As someone who loves watching the same film again and again, there is nothing more exciting than finding a film that still has something new to offer every time. There is still an abundance of hidden details in the set design of Notting Hill, some of them quite amusing. So next time you decide to revisit Notting Hill, or even visit it for the first time, do watch out for the story on tube strikes in one of the newspapers. It would be a delightful treasure hunt from then on. 

References: 

Roger Mitchell, Notting Hill, Universal Pictures, 1999 

‘Visual Culture: Illustrated Press and Photography’ in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, 1st edn,(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), III, pp. 641-643 

*All film stills from Notting Hill.