And so we arrive at Notting Hill. The curiously 'mixed' early character of this district was formed by speculative builders over-reaching themselves. The hope had been to extend the development of up-market Kensington to the north of Kensington Palace and Holland Park, (then the private garden of Holland House). But the designated fields between the Notting Hill toll-gate and the Grand Union Canal, running parallel with the Harrow Road, were a mix of grazing for London's dairy cows, and brick fields, where clay was dug out and baked into house bricks. There were pigs everywhere, and the drainage was worse than poor.

But such was the eager confidence of the developers that they built streets of imposing stuccoed "shells" --the interiors to be finished when sold or leased-- the houses were designed to be middle and upper middle class family town dwellings. But that market was oversupplied, the hoped for buyers didn't come. At the southern end, up to about Chepstow Villas, they had some initial success. But to the north it was very patchy, a few houses were completed and occupied, but often soon abandoned, and not without reason.

Firstly, to the west, (where Elgin Crescent and Ladbroke Square Gardens now stand), was built a race course, which not only proved a magnificent failure as a business, but attracted most of London's ' low-life' on race days --and to the consternation of 'respectability', overnight, too. While immediately to the north of that, in a land of mire, into the soggy,cholera ridden brickfields running up to the canal, the new railway, and the sulphurous Kensal Green Gas Works, had moved a large number of the former inhabitants of the notorious inner London 'rookeries', --which were steadily being demolished, to make way for the railways and the associated redevelopment of central London-- but there being no obligation upon anybody to rehouse the displaced population, they had made their own way to this attractive corner of North Kensington, already the home of Irish pig breeders, 'totting' gypsies and itinerant brick makers. Here, in a vast and sudden ramshackle shanty town, such as one sees today on the fringes of latin-american cities, they had made their home. The area was known as the "Piggeries and Potteries". It was estimated that there were as many pigs as people living in the improvised shacks and tents. Many started to take up residence in the unfinished new houses. When the wind was in the wrong direction, the smell over in Kensington High Street was unbearable --( it was this that eventually led to something being done about conditions [elementary drainage for one thing] ; and that out of self-interest, for it was still widely believed that cholera was airborne; there was cholera in the "Piggeries and Potteries", and if respectable folk could smell the air coming from there .....Well ! -clearly, 'something had to be done').

If all that wasn't enough, to the east, at the top of the little hedge lined Portobello Lane -- then leading to Portobello Farm and the bridge over the canal -- was the equally 'ill famed' Kensal 'New Town', reputedly home of the valorous regiments of London's dog thieves, and where gambling on organized dog fights was the main occupation. Regular large scale fights among the men, amounting to drunken riots, were famous, too. The women seem to have been the breadwinners, working in Mr Knight's carpet beating yards by the canal, or as washerwomen, which was the principal trade --( unless one includes 'dognapping', where the men would snatch high-class dogs in Kensington Gardens and pin up ransom notes. Unfortunate unransomed dogs would simply be fed to the next batch of hostages, making it a business requiring very little capital.)

Yet gradually order of sorts emerged from the chaos. Street by street, in patchwork fashion, the houses were finished, though mostly as houses of multiple occupation rather than the intended middle class family dwellings. The better houses attracted rather 'odd-ball' bohemian, sometimes 'blacksheep', members of the upper class, the artist WP Frith -( painter of the wonderful 'Derby Day')- being one notable example. German pork butchers opened up, and lady Italian mantua makers and French staymakers moved in, and from very early on there was a jewish community. Some of Napoleon's relatives arrived to live in Chepstow Villas.Theatrical types took upstairs rooms, and notices advertising 'Singing Lessons' started to appear in downstairs windows.

The several modest little mews built behind the large houses, whose private carriages and horses it was anticipated would be housed there, soon became instead the homes of northwest London's cabmen and horsekeepers and their ostlers, who brought with them their own distinct culture, not far removed from that of the old coachmen, which indeed, many were.

And it was into one of these, Ledbury Mews, (West) -- tucked behind the corner of the rather grand residential Chepstow Villas, and the more workaday Ledbury Road, less than a minute's walk from Portobello Lane (now Road) -- that in 1856 or early 1857, the Darbys moved. They were among the first occupants, and there would remain Darbys in this or other nearby mews for more than a hundred years. These were two and three room dwellings over stables, all facing into a cobbled courtyard, entered from Ledbury Road under a coach arch. Ledbury Mews was also graced by having a pub at its entrance.

They initially took up residence in number two, which they retained for the rest of the century, but at various times, and as the family grew, various members, occupied most of the properties on the southern, Chepstow Villas side of the yard. (The mews, its arch and cobbles, number two and the adjoining dwellings, are still there, and to outward view not greatly changed, beyond extravagant smartening up. The lowness of the arch irresitibly reminds one of Mr. Jingle's staccato cautionary tale in 'Pickwick' as their coach passed under just such a one : "heads, heads --- take care of your heads!   ... other day -- five children -- mother --- tall lady, eating sandwiches --- forgot the arch --- crash--knock--children look round--mother's head off--sandwich in her hand--no mouth to put it in...shocking...".  Inside the houses nothing is left of the past. Most of the block of facing stables and cabmen's lofts with their outside metal stairs have been rebuilt.)

So what brought William here? Certainly the post-war tailoring slump, and the steady 'progress' of sweated outworking, would leave little incentive to stay close to the west-end. The family was growing--(Elizabeth was pregnant again)--and Ledbury Mews would offer more room than could be afforded in Marylebone. Perhaps he reasoned that the new and daily growing neighbourhood of Notting Hill would be an opportunity for a fellow setting up for himself, not available in Marylebone. Or he may have had trade contacts in the area who promised him a steady supply of outwork : here we must note that already established as a tailor nearby was a Mr Rolf, and it may or may not be a coincidence that the Rolfs were a Bishops Stortford tailoring family. Yet more intriguing, the only tailors in Kensal Green, (where Ladbroke Grove now meets the Harrow Road), were William East, himself in Bond Street in the 1840s, married to Emma Pierce, herself from an old tailoring family, whose daughter, three year old Alice Amelia East , was to be William Strong Darby's future daughter-in-law ; and further along by the cemetery, none other than Henry Salmon, formerly of Waltham Abbey !

But beyond that, it must surely have had something to do with the horses, the cabmen, the ostlers and their world, resonating with his boyhood memories and dreams. If he could not be a ruddy cheeked coachdriver, the nearest a middle aged London tailor might get to it, would be to live among men who were the closest available equivalent. The fact that he fantasized to others -(his children and grandchildren)- his absent father as a coachman, even if intended as a ruse, must be significant. And we have the safer testimony of his grandson, Teddy, who himself knew 'a thing or two' about horses, that "Old William could handle horses," which requires an affinity as much as a skill.

So perhaps it was a sort of homecoming, the mews atmosphere being evocative of life long before, in and around the Tylers' coach yard, and Henry Gilbey's stables, in his days with James and Sarah Carpenter back in Stortford. But for the rest of his life, from early in the morning till late at night, William would hear the mews yard echo to the clop of hooves and the grind of wheels, as cabs swept in and out beneath the coach arch; and he would share the ostlers' and drivers' banter.  And everywhere the tang of hay and horses. And the flies.