Notting Hill is an affluent district of West London, England, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Notting Hill is known for being a cosmopolitan and multicultural neighbourhood, hosting the annual Notting Hill Carnival and Portobello Road Market. From around 1870, Notting Hill had an association with artists. For much of the 20th century, the large houses were subdivided into multi-occupancy rentals. Caribbean immigrants were drawn to the area in the 1950s because of the cheap rents, but were exploited by slum landlords like Peter Rachman and became the target of white Teddy Boys in the 1958 Notting Hill race riots. Known for its slum housing, in the early 21st century, after decades of gentrification, Notting Hill has a reputation as an affluent and fashionable area, known for attractive terraces of large Victorian townhouses and high-end shopping and restaurants. A Daily Telegraph article in 2004 used the phrase "the Notting Hill Set" to refer to a group of emerging Conservative politicians, such as David Cameron and George Osborne, who would become Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer and were once based in Notting Hill.

Notting Hill is in the historic county of Middlesex. It was a hamlet on rural land until the expansion of urban London during the 19th century; as late as 1870 after the hamlet had become a London suburb, Notting Hill was still referred to as being in Middlesex rather than in London. The origin of the name "Notting Hill" is uncertain though an early version appears in the Patent Rolls of 1356 as Knottynghull, while an 1878 text and New London, reports that the name derives from a manor in Kensington called "Knotting-Bernes,", "Knutting-Barnes," or "Nutting-barns", goes on to quote from a court record during Henry VIII's reign that "the manor called Notingbarons, alias Kensington, in the parish of Paddington, was held of the Abbot of Westminster." For years, it was thought to be a link with Canute, but it is now thought that the "Nott" section of the name is derived from the Saxon personal name Cnotta, with the "ing" part accepted as coming from the Saxon for a group or settlement of people.

The area in the west around Pottery Lane was used in the early 19th century for making bricks and tiles out of the heavy clay dug in the area. The clay was fired in a series of brick and tile kilns; the only remaining 19th-century tile kiln in London is on Walmer Road. In the same area, pig farmers moved in after being forced out of the Marble Arch area. Avondale Park was created in 1892 out of a former area of pig slurry called "the Ocean"; this was part of a general clean-up of the area which had become known as the Potteries and Piggeries. The area remained rural until London's westward expansion reached Bayswater in the early 19th century; the Ladbroke family was Notting Hill's main landowner, from the 1820s James Weller Ladbroke began to develop the Ladbroke Estate. Working with the architect and surveyor Thomas Allason, Ladbroke began to lay out streets and houses, with a view to turning the area into a fashionable suburb of the capital. Many of these streets bear the Ladbroke name, including Ladbroke Grove, the area's main north-south axis, Ladbroke Square, London's largest private garden square.

The original idea was to call the district Kensington Park, other roads are reminders of this. The local telephone prefix 7727 is based on the old telephone exchange name of PARk. Ladbroke left the actual business of developing his land to the firm of City solicitors, Bayley, who worked with Allason to develop the property. In 1823 Allason completed a plan for the layout of the main portion of the estate; this marks the genesis of his most enduring idea – the creation of large private communal gardens known as "pleasure grounds", or "paddocks", enclosed by terraces and/or crescents of houses. Instead of houses being set around a garden square, separated from it by a road, Allason's houses would have direct access to a secluded communal garden in the rear, to which people on the street did not have access and could not see. To this day these communal garden squares continue to provide the area with much of its attraction for the wealthiest householders. In 1837 the Hippodrome racecourse was laid out.

The racecourse ran around the hill, bystanders were expected to watch from the summit of the hill. However, the venture was not a success, in part due to a public right of way which traversed the course, in part due to the heavy clay of the neighbourhood which caused it to become waterlogged; the Hippodrome closed in 1841, after which development resumed and houses were built on the site. The crescent-shaped roads that circumvent the hill, such as Blenheim Crescent, Elgin Crescent, Stanley Crescent, Cornwall Crescent and Landsdowne Crescent, were built over the circular racecourse tracks. At the summit of hill stands the elegant St John's church, built in 1845 in the early English style, which formed the centrepiece of the Ladbroke Estate development; the Notting Hill houses were large, but they did not succeed in enticing the richest Londoners, who tended to live closer to the centre of London in Mayfair or Belgravia. The houses appealed to the upper middle class, who could live there in Belgravia style at lower prices.

In the opening chapter of John Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga novels, he housed the Nicholas Forsytes "in Ladbroke Grove, a spacious abode and a great bargain". In 1862 Thomas Hardy left Dorchester for London to work with architect Arthur Blomfield.

Juan Manuel Rodríguez Domínguez known as Juanma, is a Spanish retired footballer who played as a central defender, the current manager of Recreativo de Huelva B. Born in Huelva, Juanma finished his formation with Recreativo de Huelva, made his senior debuts while on loan at Club Atlético Cortegana, he returned from loan in the 1993 summer, being assigned to the main squad in Segunda División B. Juanma appeared in the following campaigns, but lost his starting spot in 1997–98 as his side was promoted to Segunda División. In the 1998 summer he left Recre and moved to AD Ceuta in the third level. In 2001 Juanma moved abroad for the first time in his career, joining G. D. Estoril Praia after a spell at Algeciras CF. After appearing in only one match he returned to his native country, signing for Bollullos CF. Juanma played in the lower leagues for the remainder of his career, retired with CD Punta Umbría. After his retirement Juanma became Manolo Zambrano's assistant at his first club Recreativo, maintained his role under Lucas Alcaraz.

He returned on 14 June 2011, as Juan Carlos Ríos' second. On 10 March 2012 Juanma was appointed manager of the main squad, after Álvaro Cervera's resignation, he only achieved two wins in 15 games. Juanma at BDFutbol Juanma manager profile at BDFutbol Juanma at ForaDeJogo

The study of the settlements of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture provides important insights into the early history of Europe. The Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, which existed in the present-day southeastern European nations of Moldova and Ukraine during the Neolithic Age and Copper Age, from 5500 to 2750 BC, left behind thousands of settlement ruins containing a wealth of archaeological artifacts attesting to their cultural and technological characteristics. Refer to the main article for a general description of this culture; the latest research suggests that some of the largest mega sites contained as many as 3,000 structures and with the possibility of 20,000 to 46,000 inhabitants. Maidanets may have contained 3,000 houses and a population of anything between 12,000 and 46,000 with 29,000 as the average population figure. Dobrovody and Talianki are estimated with populations up to 16,200 and 21,000. In terms of overall size, some of Cucuteni-Trypillia sites, such as Talianki in the Uman district of Ukraine, are as large as the more famous city-states of Sumer in the Fertile Crescent, these Eastern European settlements predate the Sumerian cities by more than half of a millennium.

The reason that academicians have not designated the gigantic settlements of Cucuteni-Trypillia culture as "cities", is due to the lack of conclusive evidence for internal social differentiation or specialization. However, there is some debate among scholars whether these settlements ought to be labeled as proto-cities; the Cucuteni-Trypillia settlements were located on a place where the geomorphology provided natural barriers to protect the site: most notably using high river terraces or canyon edges. The natural barriers were supplemented with fences and ditches, or more elaborate wooden and clay ramparts; the role of the fortifications found at these settlements was to protect the tribe's domestic animal herd from wild predators. Other hypotheses are that the fortifications were for protection against enemy attacks, or as a means to gather the community; the role of these fortifications, however, is still debated among scholars. The most common arrangement of construction for Cucuteni-Trypillia settlements was to place most of the buildings in a circular pattern surrounding a central structure.

The earliest villages consisted of ten to fifteen wattle-and-daub households. In their heyday, settlements expanded to include several hundred large huts, sometimes with two stories; these houses were warmed by an oven, had round windows. Some of the huts included kilns, which were used to fire the distinctive pottery for which the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture is known; these settlements underwent periodical acts of destruction and re-creation, as they were burned and rebuilt every 60–80 years. Some scholars have theorized that the inhabitants of these settlements believed that every house symbolized an organic living, entity; each house, including its ceramic vases, ovens and innumerable objects made of perishable materials, shared the same circle of life, all of the buildings in the settlement were physically linked together as a larger symbolic entity. As with living beings, the settlements may have been seen as having a life cycle of death and rebirth; as the settlements grew larger, the houses were arranged in two elliptical rows, separated by a space of 70–100 metres.

Each household was completely self-supportive within these communities, as if instead of being located within a settlement, each family was living away from town and neighbors in the country. There was a lack of public infrastructure within these settlements, which compelled the inhabitants to include all aspects of their lives within their own domicile, thus the buildings included both the sacred and profane, which some authorities see as evidence to support the idea that the inhabitants viewed their homes as living beings. The existence of the giant settlements was discovered in the 1960s, when the military topographer K. V. Shishkin noticed the presence of peculiar spots from certain aerial photographs. Scholars posit two theories regarding the impetus behind the formation of the large Cucuteni-Trypillia settlements: That they were created in response to the threat of invaders or attacks from people of the open steppes; that they appeared as a result of natural development and growth, which included the threat of inter-tribal warfare from other Cucuteni-Trypillia settlements, as the population growth exerted economic and social pressures on the limited resources of the area.

Ukrainian archeologist Ivan T. Černjakov credits the large size of some of the Cucuteni-Trypillia settlements to their agricultural system, affected by the climatic changes over the years. This can be seen by examining the modern changes in sea level of the nearby Black Sea; some of these large settlements include: Talianki, Ukraine – c. 3700 BCE – up to 21,000 inhabitants, up to 2,700 houses, covered an area of 450 hectares. Talianki was the largest Trypillia settlement around 3700 BC. after beginning of regular excavations at 1981 were explored more than 42 dwellings and few pits. Dobrovody, Ukraine – c. 3800 BCE – up to 16,200 inhabitants, covered an area of 250 hectares (600 acres, explored remains of 5 dwellings. Maydanets, Ukraine – c. 3700 BCE – up to 46,000 inhabitants, with 29,000 as the most plausible, (probably between