At around midnight on May 17 1959, a white gang ambushed Antiguan carpenter Kelso Cochrane on a Notting Hill slum street. One of them plunged a knife into his heart. When the police failed to catch the killer, many black people believed it would have been different if the victim had been white. Murder in Notting Hill is a tale of crumbling tenements transformed into a millionaires' playground, of the district's fading white working class, and of a veil finally being lifted on the past.