Rachel Johnson
Introducing the new novel Shire Hell and talking about Boris
Above: Rachel Johnson photographed by Charlie Pinder
“Have you read Notting Hell?” demands Rachel Johnson, as soon as we walk into her garden. “Because that’s the garage. Can you believe it?” For those who haven’t read her last novel, which of course is pure fiction inspired only loosely by Rachel’s real life in W11, the garage is an outhouse erected behind one of the several million pound homes that share her communal garden. It was granted planning permission to house a car. “But why would a car need all those windows, and a wine cellar in the basement? Does it look like any garage you’ve ever seen?” The windows have balustrades and elaborate plasterwork and even by W11 standards, it’s a very luxurious place to put your wheels. “I just don’t understand how that got past the planning department at Kensington and Chelsea,” complains Rachel.
Notting Hell is the novel that offended all Rachel’s neighbours by depicting a life very like her own on a communal garden surrounded by grotesquely rich people whose lives are full of stratospherically expensive kitchens, catered dinner parties and feng shui counsellors. Some details are so similar to Rachel’s life that their concerns are justified (in the novel, journalist Mimi’s neighbour Gideon is a minimalist architect; in real life journalist Rachel lives next door to minimalist architect John Pawson, for instance, and, of course, the garage really exists) but to be quite honest, says Rachel, her real neighbours didn’t provide enough copy. “I invented Lonsdale Gardens! This is a work of fiction!” she cries – and anyway, people should stop flattering themselves. “Ninety per cent of people who thought they were in Notting Hell weren’t in it, but the more you tell them it’s not them, the more they insist it is. In the end they couldn’t decide whether it was more insulting to be in it or not to be in it.”
Rachel has lived on the garden for 15 years, since she and her husband bought the house for a fraction of its current value. Not many people are still there from when they first moved in, and over the years the place has been getting less and less normal. “I suppose it was about five years ago that we began to notice a certain level of glossiness set in. The cars were all very shiny and the children were all very tidy in their posh uniforms and the mothers started looking very groomed and you began to feel this wall of money washing over the neighbourhood. Still, this garden is quite low key compared to some of them. Like that one, with Ruby Wax and everyone,” she says, gesturing. Plus of course the endless building work. “Can you imagine, there are two swimming pools being built in Elgin Crescent at the moment. How can that be allowed?” Still, pools aside, it’s the village feel that Rachel loves, especially the market, of which she is a firm supporter. “I’ve seen the market decline, it used to be absolutely rammed every day – we’ve got to use it, people just go to Tesco but they should understand the economics of the traders’ lives: up at 4am, set up the stall, stand there until 5.30pm and sell things cheaper than Tesco. It’s so important to use it.”
Originally Rachel moved to W11 in 1978 when her mother bought a flat in Elgin Crescent. Her mother is the artist Charlotte Johnson Wahl and her father is Stanley Johnson; she is one of their four children and her older brother, of course, is Boris, who when we meet has not yet won the Mayoral contest and is still on the campaign trail. Of course she voted for him. “You can imagine what fun it was having Boris as an older brother. He was just so funny and we longed for him to play with us. But now I’m only known as the sister of Boris and you have to be quite grown up about that because it is quite annoying.” They grew up on the communal garden and when Rachel was pregnant with her son Ludo she and her husband were living in Hillgate Village and she decided that she could only bear to live on either
Clarendon Road, Lansdowne Road or Elgin Crescent. “I earmarked the three streets and refused to look anywhere else and I was right. The house has probably appreciated 10 times since then.” And is she tempted to sell it, like Mimi, the character in Notting Hell who is very aware of being the poorest family on the garden and who is financially tempted but doesn’t want to leave? “We’re going to hang on as long as we can. My children say ‘when I grow up I definitely want to live in Notting Hill’ and I think, darlings,
I do hope you’ll be able to. They think that’s simply what happens, you grow up and you have a big house and your children go to Wetherby, but later you realise that really, life is quite scary.”
Rachel may have the postcode but she’s not living the life of the groomed and leisured W11 wife: not only is she very much a working mother with a successful column in the Sunday Times and three novels under her belt, but she distances herself from Notting Hill’s crazy lifestyle by spending half her time in Exmoor, where they own a “very beautiful plain unimproved farmhouse with 500 acres of land”. Here Rachel transforms into a “farmhouse mummy,” spending all her time “making scones and pegging washing and not answering the phone. And I’m a genuinely nicer person for it.” This is where the new book Shire Hell is set, though not literally here – it’s set in Dorset – and anyway she’s got no neighbours to offend, so there won’t be all the same debates about where her fiction meets reality. She’s very pleased with the book (“it’s brilliant, better than Notting Hell”) but mostly worried about the launch party. “I’m only allowed a really small one but I’ve got a list of 400 people. So that’s how I’m going to offend them this time, by not inviting them.” Shire Hell starts where Notting Hell stops, with Mimi and Ralph relocating to Dorset, but there won’t be a third instalment since Rachel thinks she’ll lay them to rest after that.
Her next book will be something completely different, set, unpredictably, in Munich in the 1930s when there was a fashion for English debutante girls to go to Germany. “It’s about the British upper classes’ flirtation with Nazism but told through a prism of today’s concerns about the environment,” explains Rachel. “My grandmother was a student in Munich and my mother-in-law went there as a deb. Plus, they’ve just done a programme about Boris and discovered that in fact we’re all German so at the moment I feel that all roads are leading to Munich.”
But meanwhile, in her kitchen, Rachel is as preoccupied with house prices as the next W11 dweller. “I don’t know what to hope for, probably a big housing crash. I mean, what are our children going to do?” She thinks that the days of her neighbours’ multi-million pound pay packages are over – and if they are, then what next for Notting Hill? Anyway she’s more interested in the past at the moment, with another local novel up her sleeve. “I was thinking of writing a rackety, sexy prequel to Notting Hell all about W11 before it became glossy and swish, when the pubs were full of Irish people fighting and Jo Strummer and people dealing drugs and all that, but Penguin didn’t like it. My father even came up with a title – Hell’s Belles.” Maybe Penguin will change their mind. Either way, Rachel’s unlikely to stop writing about the area, so look out for her. l
Shire Hell is published by Penguin on 15 May