ORIGINAL MESSAGE

NAME: James (Jas) Cowen    Then & Now

DATE: 18 April 2017

CONNECTION WITH QE: pupil 56-63

I recently attended the funeral of the mother of an old friend, who was the wife of the best man at my wedding. On the printed order of the service there was a map of where her mother was born and grew up. The area was World's End in the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. This name was a new one to me and I have enquired about why it was called World's End. Apparently it took its name from the fact that King James II regularly rode down Kings Road and considered it to be "the end of the world" on his ride. In the 1960s the fashionable set who made their home at the other end of the Kings Road discovered the gem that was the World's End and found it was the perfect place to open the boutique Granny Takes a Trip. Several other boutiques and hippie shops also clustered round the World's End in the late '60s including Gandalf's Garden and The Sweet Shop. The latter shop was frequented by Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton and Keith Richards. In the '70s a well known boutique was started by Vivienne Westwood and is now known apparently as "World's End". This is not a part of the world I went to in any of this time but I do remember another part of London famous in the 60s - Carnaby Street.

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