In an incredibly affluent area just next to Holland Park sits a reminder of the grimy past of urban London.  Walking down a road in Notting Hill where the houses are worth several million pounds, it is an odd experience seeing an 19th Century brick kiln built into a 1960s set of flats.

This area of London wasn’t always the realm of the wealthy.  In the mid-19th Century, it was actually the location of the aptly named “Potteries and Piggeries” slum.   The soil of the area was full of clay, which made it perfect for the production of bricks (hence the road name Pottery Lane).  As for the pigs, they had moved from Marble Arch as new buildings were thrown up and the Piggeries moved to open ground. 

Pig famers lived with their animals; the brick manufacturers dug pits straight out of the earth and there was no formal drainage or sanitation.  It was not long before the whole area descended into a giant slum which attracted the rougher sections of Victorian society.  Soon one of the lanes was nicknamed “Cut Throat Lane”.  Perhaps even more graphically, one of the giant holes left by the clay extraction had filled up with so much pig slurry and detritus that it became known as “The Ocean”. 

The kiln itself is still an imposing and surprising presence at 7.5 meters high and 6 meters wide and stumbling across it is surprising in the least.  Its bottle shape has now, apparently been adapted into a remarkable additional room for a house extension. 

Today, Pottery Lane is a lovely part of London with very little evidence of its darker past.  But, as with most of London, if you know where to look you can still see the building blocks that got us to where we are now.