My first year in London: David Ginsberg

This week, it’s the turn of David Ginsberg, a treasured early supporter of The Londoner who runs his family business, a leading children’s clothing company. But this edition is a slight twist on the theme — rather than a transplant to the Big Smoke, David is actually a born and bred Londoner who grew up just near Lancaster Gate. Here, Hannah speaks to him about how the capital has changed and stayed the same, featuring the perils of tea-tray sledging down Parliament Hill, being bribed into going to Selfridges and the long-lost clubs of Brick Lane. 

The Londoner: So David, hello! You’re from London, yes? Where did you grow up?

David Ginsberg: Not far away from where I am now in Notting Hill — sort of between Lancaster Gate and Marble Arch. So basically our garden was Hyde Park. My mum still lives there. And I went to school at the French Lycée [Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle de Londres] up the road — I started when I was five, not speaking any French, and then by the end of the first year I could speak it fluently — and followed that all the way through to GCSEs and A-Levels there.

Can you tell me a bit about your childhood in London?

I’d always go to Hampstead Heath for a walk with my father and half-siblings, and we’d go to a pub near the park — obviously, children weren’t allowed inside pubs in those days, so I’d wait outside and they’d bring me out a sausage. And one year it was snowing and all these people were sledging down Parliament Hill, and someone on a tea tray knocked me over! [Laughs]. Where we lived, our local big store was Selfridges, so we’d go do the food shopping there. My mum was a designer and she’d want to have a look at fashions, so she'd always bribe my brother and I by buying us a book or a toy. 

Did your parents come from London as well?

Yeah, my dad was actually a Cockney; he was born in Hackney and moved over to Cricklewood as my grandfather had a greengrocer’s there. My dad was an older father — he had me when he was 49 — and was actually born in 1926, so he would tell me all these stories of how London had changed, what it was like during the Second World War, things like that.