Holland Park proper was one of my favorite places to hang out in London when I lived there, chiefly because it was a ten minute walk from my house. It was an enormous estate owned by the Earl of Holland, who used the house as his city residence and a center for entertainment until it was reduced to rubble by air raids in World War II. The estate (and the rubble) was then gifted to the city, who turned it into a pretty park, and wisely kept the ruins of the house as is.

One thing London doesn't do well is big streets. There are loads of them cutting across the ancient villages and generally leading to the City of London, the square mile that was the heart of medieval London but now is just home for a bunch of banks. These streets are invariably lined with unimaginative shops and takeout restaurants, lots of 1960's architecture and really ugly street furniture, primarily big gates and fences ensuring pedestrians have as difficult a time as possible crossing the street. If you see London mostly from a taxi or tourist bus, you'll mostly see this ugliness, so it's very important to walk as much as possible, as the small roads are infinitely nicer and more typical of the charm of the city. That was a long lead in to the fact that we crossed ugly Notting Hill Gate to get to Holland Park. This is another residential neighborhood surrounding a park of the same name. In Holland Park you can either live in a flat in one of the grand apartments built more than a century ago as individual houses by an ambitious real estate developer, or in the cute alleyways behind these houses where the servants and horses lived.