The subject of this article is the downward trajectory of a street called Garden Terrace, between Notting Hill and Fulham, as it sinks from an upper-middle-class street of prim and respectable family houses all the way down to a slum. Although there is no such street on contemporary London maps, the real Palace Gardens Terrace in Kensington, as pictured in photographs of the period, certainly lives up to the grand appearance of the street as Rapoport first sees it. Rapoport describes how, over time, the outward look of the street changes to match the changing nature of its inhabitants, as the well-to-do occupants flee and the family houses are taken over by ‘house farmers’ and divided up into individual flats, with an ever-increasing rate of tenant turnover, driven partly by the constantly rising rents. The street becomes visibly dirtier; glass door panels and cast-iron grilles are broken; the live-in maids and lace in the windows give place to bedraggled visiting charwomen, faded calico curtains, and eventually rags. The regal silence and closely guarded privacy of the street's heyday are superseded by the sounds of piano tunes and singing coming from open windows, the knocking of knocker-ups, the shouts of milkmen, greengrocers, rag-and-bone men, knife grinders and pedlars of all kinds. The street fills with children playing outside and its very smell changes, as it is permeated with the odours of fried fish and damp washing. Coal is now bought by the half-hundredweight rather than the half-ton, or not bought at all. And as for the inhabitants of the street, they too change out of all recognition. The solicitors and businessmen are replaced first by the ‘aristocracy of labour’, the comparatively well-off families of carpenters, mechanics and postmen, whose wives had formerly been in service and whose children are clean and not too numerous. This is the point at which Rapoport himself moves into one of the Garden Terrace flats, and the narrative of his interactions with his upstairs and downstairs neighbours traces the declining fortunes of the street.