Royal Borough
Kensington. By William Gaunt. (Batsford, 25s.) `No other quarter of London is so consciously, hard-boiledly, shamelessly middle-class.' So wrote H. J. Massingham of Kensington in 1933, and a quarter of a century that has seen a Second. World War and a social revolution has not materially altered the spirit of the place : why, the devil should it be ashamed of being middle-class? Wil- liam Gaunt's perlustrations and researches in our own time have brought him to the conclusion that Kensington is also `the most typical of all Vic- torian creations,' which is perhaps only another way of saying what Massingham said. It may be that although Kensington's latter-day residents have to do in earnest, and gladly, what Lord Leighton played at doing CI live in a mews,' he used to say, laughingly, of his red-brick mansion in Holland Park Road), the Rent Act will force the not-quite middle-class infiltrators back to the Hammersmiths and Paddingtons where they really belong, and Kensington continue to be desirably residential, if not quite so lavishly domesticked as in Leighton's day. All the great Victorian residents are recalled in Mr. Gaunt's pleasant prose, and their mansions and memorials and studios in his well-chosen photographs and the admirable little drawings from his lively pen. He brings his pious perambu- lation so up to date as to include that very tur Kensingtonian person and that very un-Kensing- tonian place, Percy Wyndham Lewis and the Portobello Road.
CYRIL MAI(
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