The ever-changing Napoleons of Notting Hill The inhabitants interviewed fell into three broad groups. First came the poor, white Londoners. Then, from the 1950s onwards, came the middle-class "settlers." Here I should declare an interest, since my own parents were among this group - first-time buyers in Notting Hill in 1955. Sydney Smith once wrote that Heaven is "eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets," and it came true in Notting Hill. My parents had just started some foie gras, which my father had brought back from France, when a Salvation Army band came tootling round the corner. That memory gives a flavour of the social mix of the era. Last, from the 1980s, came the international bankers, with their stratospheric wealth, lured by Notting Hill, the film. As the television programme went out, their world was crumbling with the news of the Barclays rate-fixing scandal. Where should one's sympathies lie in this saga of social change? It was usually the former slum-dwellers who had the best lines. John Wakelin, for example, now "skint" and living in a caravan in Cornwall, was shown returning to the district. He complained about the shops: "You've got little artistic places. Who wants them? Amen to that. But the pleasant surprise of a programme which could easily have been preachy was that it brought out the likeability of most of the residents, of whatever era and class. Most seemed very fond of the place where they lived. There was charming cine film (young father in his suit smoking as he pushed his child on a swing) of a haut-bourgeois couple called Hicks when they moved into a house which cost them £11,750 in 1968. They are still there today, very jolly, full of goodwill, and proud of the four successful sons they educated at the local primary school (though not, of course, the local comprehensive). Nico Bonelli, a mild young financier and recent resident, protested that he had not minded being robbed in Portland Road. It was left to his rather more pushy wife to inform us that he had been mugged at gunpoint. The only annoying people were those who denigrated whoever had succeeded them. One rather bohemian person who had bought her house about 30 years ago said that, with rich people buying in, "It's just greed. Nothing else. Why is it necessarily greedy to buy a house which is expensive? Henry Mayhew - the same name, oddly, as the great Victorian author of London Labour and the London Poor - is a youngish man whose inherited money comes from the old Barclays banking fortune of the Gurney family. He was moving out of Portland Road, he said, because "you don't know how boring it is" living among bankers. Yet he himself is a financial adviser, and seemed curiously excited by the £3 million value of his house ("I don't like to boast"). We saw Henry going off to live the good life in a hut in a wood in East Anglia (on a Gurney estate). His attitude was a muddle. His objection to bankers had something to do with the fact that their wealth was now even greater than his. He was rude about them like Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney in reverse, as if shouting, "I am considerably poorer than yow!" Quite the most delightful witness was George, former slum-child and Teddy boy of the 1950s. He thought the change was mainly for the better: "Our landlords never had the money. We never had the money," so it was better that others spent theirs to put the houses right. He was pleased with his house in a poorer district and with his family: "We improved on my parents. All my kids improved on me. The great political and social question of our time, however, is whether George's grandchildren, when they are old, will be able to look back on a comparable age of improvement. The way things are going just now, Portland Road, in another 50 years, could be a slum once again.