Dog walking in Notting Hill
A few minutes’ walk to Kensington Gardens. Pastel houses, market mornings, and dogs who think Portobello belongs to them.
If you live in Notting Hill, you live within a comfortable walk of one of London’s most beautiful parks. We’ve been making that walk twice a day with our pack, since 2007.
We work on foot only. Door to door, no vans, no transit. The longest walk from any Notting Hill home to Kensington Gardens is about twenty minutes. Most homes are much closer.
From your door to Kensington Gardens
We pick up dogs from streets like Kensington Park Road, Ladbroke Road, Pembridge Villas, and Chepstow Villas, and from the network of streets between them. From there we head south as a pack, crossing toward the park through quieter side streets.
Most of our routes pass close to Notting Hill Gate station, the unofficial line between Notting Hill and the rest of our patch. From there it’s a short walk down to one of two gates we use to enter Kensington Gardens.
It sounds like a long walk on paper, but the dogs know every step. After the first few weeks they recognise the route, the corners, the people. The walk to the park is part of the walk itself, not just a way of getting there.
The streets we walk through Notting Hill on the way to the park
Why your dog will love it
Notting Hill is a busy neighbourhood. Markets, traffic, scooters, tourists. At first that can feel like a lot for a new dog. But our dogs walk this way every day, and the routine makes them remarkably calm. After a few weeks, the noise stops being noise. It just becomes background.
What they actually pay attention to are the other dogs we meet on the way (and there are many), and the people they recognise: a doorman, a regular at a café, a friendly neighbour who always stops to say hello.
The dogs themselves are a bit of a local attraction. Walking with a small pack of well-behaved dogs through Notting Hill, on foot rather than tucked away in a van, gets noticed. Tourists stop us most days to take photos, ask if they can pet the dogs, or ask whether we know where the famous blue door from the film is. We’ve also become accidental tour guides, sometimes pointing toward Portobello before anyone even asks.
What we love about it
We talk to the dogs a lot, even on busy streets. They answer the way dogs do, with ears, eyes, the angle of their heads. We’ve been having those conversations for so long that we read them as easily as words. One morning, walking down Portobello Road, one of us was deep in conversation with the pack about something or other. Looking up, we caught the eye of one of the dogs’ owners watching from the opposite pavement, completely amused. She probably went home wondering whether her dog walker was alright.
For us, that’s the work. The streets are how we get there, but the conversations on the way are part of the day.
Notting Hill has its small kindnesses. The café tables that put water bowls out in summer, the local shops where the owners know each dog by name, the sense of being part of a small neighbourhood that recognises us back.
Postcodes and area
We cover parts of W11 2 and W11 3. Not every street in these postcodes, only the ones close enough to walk to Kensington Gardens. If you’re not sure whether you’re in our area, just send us a message and we’ll let you know.