The Line of Beauty

Moneyed London under Thatcher, seen by a young aesthete who lodges with a Tory MP's family. The map runs from the tall white houses and locked communal garden of a Notting Hill square out to the clubland of Westminster, the villas of Holland Park, and the night paths of Hampstead Heath.

Nick Guest

The Feddens' house, Kensington Park Gardens

Part 1 (1983)

Nick Guest, a young gay aesthete just down from Oxford, takes an attic room in the tall white house of the wealthy Fedden family. Hollinghurst has said the street of imposing stucco terraces that inspired the setting was Kensington Park Gardens in Notting Hill, which he passed on the way to swim in the early 1980s.

Part 1 (1983)

inferred Hollinghurst places the Feddens on a real Notting Hill street he named as his model, but the specific house is a composite, so this marks the centre of Kensington Park Gardens rather than one address.

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Nick Guest

The communal garden of the square

Part 1 (1983)

Behind the terrace lies the locked communal garden that only key-holding residents may enter, a walled green shared by the grand houses of the square. It becomes a stage for the family's parties and for Nick's watchful place at the edge of a world that is not quite his.

Part 1 (1983)

explicit The private communal garden is a real feature of the Ladbroke estate squares behind Kensington Park Gardens; this marks the large gated garden immediately south of the terrace.

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