Mister Notting Hill

After meeting at a charity auction, Parker sees a relationship with Tristan as her opportunity to fund her charity, while Tristan hopes to build a business deal with Parker's father, but neither counts on their attraction to one another when they decide to go ahead with their mutually-beneficial plans.

Notting Hill has inspired a large number of books and has often made national news – though not always for the right reasons. It has forever been an area of contrast between rich and poor, and has undergone almost constant change since it was developed from farmland in the mid-nineteenth century to today's urban landscape. Roger Rogowski's book records the memories of people who lived in working-class Notting Hill in their own words, before the substantial changes of the 1960s, including the mass demolition of slums, the construction of the Westway, the growth of the Notting Hill Carnival and the area's enthusiastic embrace of the swinging sixties. The Other Side of Notting Hill delves into everyday urban, working-class life as it was, which in many respects is almost unrecognisable today, and how people began to be affected by the changes taking place around them.

In July 1969, while the Rolling Stones played a free concert in Hyde Park, Alan Johnson and his young family left West London to start a new life. The Britwell Estate in Slough, apparently notorious among the locals, in fact came as a blessed relief after the tensions of Notting Hill, and the local community welcomed them with open arms. Alan had become a postman the previous year, and in order to support his growing family took on every bit of overtime he could, often working twelve-hour shifts six days a week. It was hard work, but not without its compensations – the crafty fag snatched in a country lane, the farmer’s wife offering a hearty breakfast and even the mysterious lady on Glebe Road who appeared daily, topless, at her window as the postman passed by... Please, Mister Postman paints a vivid picture of England in the 1970s, where no celebration was complete without a Party Seven of Watney’s Red Barrel, smoking was the norm rather than the exception, and Sunday lunchtime was about beer, bingo and cribbage. But as Alan’s life appears to be settling down and his career in the Union of Postal Workers begins to take off, his close-knit family is struck once again by tragedy... Moving, hilarious and unforgettable, Please, Mister Postman is another astonishing book from the award-winning author of This Boy.

Reproduction of the original: The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Felix