13 May 2014
Notting Hill might be full of chi-chi shops and kale smoothies but a new book is planning to bring the area’s less glamorous past back to life. Shane Spall, wife of actor Timothy Spall and mother of Rafe, is writing her debut novel, provisionally titled Sex, Drugs and the IRA.
“It’s set in Notting Hill in the Seventies, which is where I was living then,” Spall tells me. “Back when you’d see heroin addicts queuing up outside the chemists on Westbourne Grove to down morphine-laced cough medicine.”
Does she mourn the gentrification of W11’s once grubbily boho streets? “No! Of course not,” laughed Spall. “Everything has to change. And who wants to live among a load of f***ing addicts, darling?”
