London Spaces in Contemporary British Cinema: Notting Hill and South West 9

In this essay I compare and contrast the posh London of Notting Hill and the chaotic London of South West 9 (Richard Parry, 2001), but I do so through looking at the way these films represent social space in London. I argue that though these films deal with the same subject matter – the relationships between the global and the local, private and public spaces, the rural and the urban, and movement and stasis – they present very different experiences of the city. Each film privileges a localised face-to-face community over the global, but where Notting Hill adopts a conservative approach in representing Notting Hill as a collection of private spaces populated by a homogenous community, South West 9 may be described as presenting a more social democratic view, in which Brixton (the film’s title refers to this area’s London postcode) is a collection of public spaces peopled by a diverse and hybrid group.