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The area of Notting Hill is dominated by Portobello Road (pictured below), one of London’s most famous streets and a popular and unique tourist attraction. A Victorian Street, Portobello Road is shown on a map of 1841 as Porto Bello Lane. The road grew between the big estates of Notting Hill and Paddington in London’s great period of residential expansion in the second half of the 19th century. Its shops and markets served the large houses on the estates providing goods and services for the working people who lived in the surrounding areas.
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Whenever dealing with real locations, a film’s location manager must get all the necessary permission to film there. In London, streets are not normally closed for filming. But to secure the maximum cooperation of local residents and business people in the area, the location team wrote thousands of letters pledging goodwill payments to favorite charities. This resulted in over 200 different charities receiving donations for the six weeks of shooting on Notting Hill.
In addition to Portobello Road, other "Notting Hill" locations included Westbourne Park Road, Golborne Road, Landsdowne Road and the Coronet Cinema. These included the Ritz Hotel where filming in public areas had to take place at night; the Savoy Hotel, the backdrop to Anna Scott’s press conference; the Nobu Restaurant in the Metropolitan Hotel; and the Zen Garden of London’s fashionable Hempel Hotel, where scenes for the wedding reception were filmed.
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One of the the most spectacular sequences in "Notting Hill" was the recreation of a West End film premiere. All the big London premieres take place at one of the cinemas around Leicester Square, right in the heart of London’s West End. Unfortunately when the producers applied for the filming permissions, they were declined because of the enormous problems crowds caused police during a premiere attended by Leonardo DiCaprio (note: the 1998 filming of "Notting Hill" is the year after "Titanic" took the world by storm). The production eventually got the green light to create a spectacle of excited crowds and photographers and television crews to capture the arrival of Roberts and Grant’s characters attending a glittering premiere at the Empire Leicester Square cinema.
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