What ‘Notting Hill’ Got Right About My Neighborhood, and What It Left Out of Frame

09.06.2024 - 12:03 / cntraveler.com

Near the beginning of the 1999 movie Notting Hill, the character of bookseller William Thacker (Hugh Grant) spins round a London street corner and collides with superstar actress Anna Scott (Julia Roberts), spilling orange juice over the both of them. It’s a meet-cute that sets into motion one of the better known romantic comedies of the last 25 years, and entered Portobello Road into the pop culture ranks alongside Katz's Deli where Meg Ryan faked her orgasm. The scene also, perhaps more significantly, cemented the London neighborhood as a tourist destination: Notting Hill had long drawn visitors, but almost immediately it was flooded with fans of the movie. On any given day, decades later, you’ll still find daily hordes of influencers posing in front of that blue door and tourists lining up outside The Travel Bookshop (now The Notting Hill Bookshop) where the film's Scott later uttered her now famous line: “I'm just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.”

With those words, what was once just another London postcode instantly became a pin on the Hollywood map.

Yet “this small village in the middle of a city,” to quote Thacker, also happens to be where I grew up—and why I remain disproportionately attached to this relic of the rom-com era. Watching the pair crash into each other in the orange juice scene is, for me, a prompt to remember what was taking place outside the frame: If the camera were to zoom out beyond the perimeters of the movie set, exposing the lights and the producers and the catering trucks, you’d also see me, age nine, walking the dog with my mother, amid the many different types of Londoners who call Notting Hill home—all of us unaware that we were witnessing our neighborhood turning into something that would no longer feel like it quite belonged to us.

In the years since, the movie Notting Hill has evolved from a well-worn VHS tape on a shelf into a virtual museum preserving my childhood and adolescence that I revisit at least once a year. When Thacker walks down Portobello Road as the seasons change, heartbroken over Scott's return to America, I can see Alan, my parents' then-grocer, manning his market stall; the antique shops my father loved to waft in and out of on Sundays in search of secondhand cameras; the rooftop cafe my mother liked to take me to for pancakes; the newsagent where I bought my first pack of cigarettes (Marlboro Lights); even a street corner that holds memories of an electrifying teenage kiss. During the pandemic, when I was unable to travel home for almost two years, I actively avoided watching the movie out of fear that it would make me unfathomably homesick.

But while it’s impossible for me not to place the weight of nostalgia and