Policing Notting Hill

Notting Hill is one of the most sought after locations in London. But its progress from 'ghetto' to gentrification spans a time when it was one of the most turbulent places in Britain. Plagued by racial tensions, unsolved killings, drugs, prostitution, no-go areas and riots, it was populated by some intriguing and challenging characters as well as being the venue for an iconic, sometimes disorderly, annual Carnival. Based on first-hand knowledge, prodigious research and hitherto unpublished sources, Policing Notting Hill also records Tony Moore's time as Divisional Commander at what Roger Graef described in the Evening Standard as the most widely publicised 'nick' in Britain. 'Tony Moore is well-fitted to write a history of Notting Hill and its relationship with the Metropolitan Police': Lord Blair of Boughton. 'All Saints Road in Notting Hill is one of those areas of London where crime is at its worst, where drug-dealing is intolerably overt and where the racial ingredient is at its most potent': Sir Kenneth Newman. 'From the late sixties until recently, All Saints Road was to drugs what Hatton Garden is to diamonds': Robert Hardman, The Spectator. A masterly account of policing, partnership and social change.

Notting Hill is one of the most sought after locations in London. But its progress from ‘ghetto’ to gentrification spans half-a-century within which it was one of the most turbulent places in Britain—plagued by decline, disadvantage, unsolved killings, riots, illegal drugs, underground bars (or ‘shebeens’), prostitution, ‘no-go areas’ and racial tension. It was also populated by characters such as self-styled community organizer Frank Crichlow, slum landlord Peter Rachman, Christine Keeler, the Angry Brigade, ‘hustlers’ such as ‘Lucky’ Gordon and Johnny Edgecombe, the activist Michael X (later executed in Trinidad) and the occasional radical lawyer. It was the location of the racist murder of Kelso Cochrane, the litigation-minded Mangrove Restaurant, the brief surge of Black Power in the UK and most notably the iconic Notting Hill Carnival with its heady mix of festivity, excitement, street crimes, potential for disorder and confrontations with the police. So what was it like operating in this ‘Symbolic Location’? In this book, Tony Moore, one of those in charge of policing Notting Hill, shows how the area continually adapted to challenges that first began after the Empire Windrush arrived in England carrying immigrants who were initially met by signs saying ‘No Coloured’, but for whom Notting Hill became an area of choice. It is a wide-ranging account of the factors in play at a time of unprecedented social change, told from the perspective of an ‘insider’, based on prodigious research including in relation to hitherto unpublished materials and personal communications. ‘Tony Moore is well-fitted to write a history of Notting Hill and its relationship with the Metropolitan Police’: Lord Blair of Boughton. ‘All Saints Road in Notting Hill is one of those areas of London, where crime is at its worst, where drug-dealing is intolerably overt and where the racial ingredient is at its most potent’: Sir Kenneth Newman, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. ‘From the late sixties until recently, All Saints Road was to drugs what Hatton Garden is to diamonds’: Robert Hardman, The Spectator.

A classic text about the need for fundamental principles for policing - by the father of community policing. John Alderson is well-known as the former chief constable of Devon and Cornwall and a leading exponent of liberal, democratic values and human rights in relation to police work. In Principled policing he demonstrates how it is all too easy for everyday police officers to fall into behaviour which becomes difficult to comprehend-as a result of working practices, working cultures, state manoeuvring and a lack of fundamental values for decision-making. Through his description of what he calls 'high police' and by way of worldwide examples-from Northern Ireland to Tiananmen Square, Nazi Germany to the FBI to the British miners strike of 1984/5-the author calls for decency, fairness and morality to act as touchstones for police officers everywhere. Principled Policing - which is dedicated to 'the innocent victims of the world's unprincipled policing' is now in use on courses for police officers looking to reach the very highest positions.

Protest and political violence are concerns of global importance in the twenty-first century. This dictionary brings together in one comprehensive volume a number of key issues relating to the conduct of protest and political violence and the response of the state and police to such activities.

The truth about one of Britain's most infamous race murders has never been revealed. At around midnight on May 17 1959, a white gang ambushed 32-year-old Antiguan carpenter Kelso Cochrane on a Notting Hill slum street. After a brief scuffle one of them plunged a knife into his heart. The impact was as profound as the aftershock of Stephen Lawrence's murder more than forty years later. The previous summer Notting Hill had been convulsed by race riots. The fascists Sir Oswald Mosley and Colin Jordan were agitating in the area. So the news of an innocent back man stabbed in west London reverberated from Whitehall to the Caribbean. And when the police failed to catch the killer, many black people believed it would have been different if the victim had been white. Murder in Notting Hill is a tale of crumbling tenements transformed into a millionaires' playground, of the district's fading white working class, and of a veil finally being lifted on the past. Part whodunnit, part social history, it reveals startling new evidence about the murder.

A search for the truth about a distant unsolved murder.

"This is an urban history of London during the pivotal years of the 1960s and 1970s, when the metropolis was transformed from an industrial city that the Victorians might have recognised to an embryonic modern 'world city.' Previous work on London in these years has tended to focus upon the 1960s -in particular the 'Swinging London' phenomenon. Mary Quant, Carnaby Street and the King's Road, Chelsea, all appear in these pages, but it is argued that the 'swinging moment' of the mid-sixties was a passing symptom of a much broader transformation from an industrial to a service-based city, and it is that transformation which this book examines. London is too complex and diverse a city to be comprehended in a simple linear narrative; this book adopts instead an innovative approach to urban history, by which London life and London's transformation are examined through a number of case studies looking at specific themes and areas of the city. Consumerism and the 'experience economy', home ownership and gentrification, deindustrialisation and deprivation, racial tension and unemployment, the attrition of public services and the steady loss of confidence in public agencies - national and local - emerge as overarching themes from the individual case studies in this book. Their combined effect, it is argued, was to prepare the ground for the Britain that Margaret Thatcher is usually held to have created after 1979 - without Thatcher herself having anything to do it"--