The Likes Of Us, a new play by Roy Williams, is a celebration of the real people in a neglected district

Notting Hill is high up the sightseeing list for visitors to London, and yet its reputation as a lively, artistic quarter of the city is actually based on a cheeky sleight of hand, according to the playwright Roy Williams.

The Richard Curtis film and the annual street carnival have made this part of North Kensington internationally famous, although it is the smaller, poorer district of Notting Dale that is the true pulse of the area, he believes.

“I like the film Notting Hill. It is OK. I just wish it was not called that somehow, because it has created the wrong idea of the place,” Williams said.

Now the council house developments of Notting Dale, which include the Lancaster West Estate where the charred ruins of Grenfell Tower stand, are the subject of his powerful new radio play, The Likes Of Us, which goes out on BBC Radio 3 on 16 February as part of a new season of drama announced on 10 February.

“I wanted to write a play about this area for exactly this reason. It is my testimony to the real people who live there,” Williams said.

The play tells of a community that has survived a series of tragedies, from the 1959 murder of the Antiguan immigrant Kelso Cochrane that prompted racial unrest, to the grim impact of John Christie’s serial killings in the 1950s, and then the recent Grenfell Tower disaster. It is also a celebration of the bonds that have grown up in adversity.

“My memories are still fresh because I grew up there and lived there until I was 26, when I moved to Ladbroke Grove. I went back often because mother’s house was in an estate just a three-minute walk from Lancaster West and a lot of my primary school friends lived there,” recalled Williams. “Grenfell could be seen from her balcony. I took no notice. It was just always there. And then on the day of the fire I could still see it burning.”

Approached by people coming to offer help and donations that day, Williams was repeatedly asked: “Where is Notting Dale?”

He told them to follow him. “It is what the people who live there call it. I was amazed by how many were coming to offer things for the survivors. We walked by the Sikh temple and saw a van being loaded,” said Williams.

He believes the area has been shaped by a dark series of events.

“The carnival to some extent came out of the death of Kelso Cochrane, and that helped bring the community back together. There was still tension between black and white youths, but it did heal the huge pressure to some extent and I grew up hearing that story.”

The writer, who is best known for his award-winning Royal Court play Sucker Punch and for his popular returning radio crime series The Interrogation, has based his new drama on his own experiences growing up in one of the poorest parts of the country within the richest borough. Starting with the devastating Grenfell fire, The Likes Of Us moves back and forth in time through the lives of Gloria, her children and her grandchild over the course of 60 years, painting a profound portrait of a family and a neighbourhood.