Gloucester Crescent, Camden

Gloucester Crescent is an 1840s Victorian residential crescent in Camden Town in London which from the early 1960s gained a bohemian reputation as “the trendiest street in London” and "Britain's cleverest street"[1] when it became home for many British writers, artists and intellectuals including Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett and Alice Thomas Ellis.[2][3]

Gloucester Crescent in 2016

Many of the homes on the crescent are Grade II listed buildings including no. 23,[4] the terraces nos. 3 to 22[5] and 24 to 29,[6] and nos. 60 and 61.[7]

The London branch of the School of Sound Recording is located in The Rotunda at 42 Gloucester Crescent.

In popular culture

School of Sound Recording London in The Rotunda at 42 Gloucester Crescent

The former home of playwright and author Alan Bennett at 23 Gloucester Crescent is the setting for The Lady in the Van based on his experiences with the eccentric woman known to him as Miss Shepherd who lived on Bennett's driveway in a series of dilapidated vans for more than fifteen years. Fairchild/Shepherd's story was first published in 1989 as an essay in the London Review of Books. In 1990 Bennett published it in book form. In 1999 he adapted it into a stage play at the Queen's Theatre in London which starred Maggie Smith who received a Best Actress nomination at the 2000 Olivier Awards[8] and which was directed by Nicholas Hytner. The stage play includes two characters named Alan Bennett. On 21 February 2009 it was broadcast as a radio play on BBC Radio 4, with Maggie Smith reprising her role[9] and Alan Bennett playing himself. He adapted the story again for the 2015 film The Lady in the Van with Maggie Smith reprising her role again, and Nicholas Hytner directing again.

Principal photography for the film version The Lady in the Van (2015) began at 23 Gloucester Crescent[10][11] in 2014. The film was shot in and around Bennett's old house in Camden Town, where the real Miss Shepherd spent 15 years on his driveway. According to director Nicholas Hytner, they never considered filming anywhere else.

In 2018 William Miller, son of Sir Jonathan Miller, published Gloucester Crescent: Me, My Dad and Other Grown-Ups based on his memories of growing up on Gloucester Crescent in the 1960s and the famous residents and visitors he encountered.[2][12]

The biographer Claire Tomalin published her autobiography A Life of My Own (2017) which included much detail of her life on Gloucester Crescent where she has lived since the 1960s.[3][13]

Notable residents

23 Gloucester Crescent, home for over 40 years to author and playwright Alan Bennett, and for 15 years on the driveway for Margaret Fairchild

• No 22: the writer and essayist Alice Thomas Ellis lived here from 1960 to 2001 with her husband the publisher Colin Haycraft until his death.[1][14][15] Since 2001 the house has belonged to photographer and film director Malcolm Venville.[1]
• No. 23: writer Alan Bennett and vagrant Margaret Fairchild lived at the Grade II listed building[4] – Bennett in the house, and Fairchild in a series of dilapidated vans parked on the driveway, as immortalised in Bennett's memoir, stage play and film.[16]
• No. 36: from 1843 the artist and etcher Lionel Percy Smythe.[17][18]
• No. 55: the journalist and musician George Melly (1926–2007) from 1964 to 1971.[19] The writer Nina Stibbe wrote a hugely successful memoir, Love, Nina, about working as a nanny for the journalist Mary-Kay Wilmers and her then husband, film-director Stephen Frears who had bought the house from Melly in 1971.[20]
• No. 57: since 1963 the home of author Claire Tomalin and her husband journalist Nicholas Tomalin[1] (and later, Claire's second husband Michael Frayn).[3][20]
• No. 63: the polymath Jonathan Miller (1934–2019) and his family from 1961.[2][14][21]
• No. 68: the artist Walter Sickert and member of the Camden Town Group was living here in 1912.[22]
• No. 69: Ursula Vaughan Williams, widow of Ralph Vaughan Williams; theatre director Max Stafford-Clark.[16][23] The current owner is William Miller, son of Jonathan Miller who lived three doors away at No. 63.[24]
• No. 70: Catherine Dickens after her separation from her husband Charles Dickens in 1858.[25]

Other residents included the novelist and screenwriter Deborah Moggach;[24][26] writer Susannah Clapp;[25] poet and playwright Louis MacNeice[25] and the Labour MP Giles Radice.[16]

References

1. The remarkable story of the cleverest street in Britain – The Oldie 1 February 2018
2. Gloucester Crescent, and a trip down memory lane – Camden New Journal 31 August 2018
3. Life and times in NW1: The hard, privileged life of a literary biographer – Times Literary Supplement 10 November 2017
4. Historic England. "23, Gloucester Crescent  (Grade II) (1342077)". National Heritage List for England.
5. Historic England. "3 to 22, Gloucester Crescent  (Grade II) (1342076)". National Heritage List for England.
6. Historic England. "24 to 29, Gloucester Crescent  (Grade II) (1342078)". National Heritage List for England.
7. Historic England. "60 and 61, Gloucester Crescent  (Grade II) (1078315)". National Heritage List for England.
8. "The Lady in the Van". Telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved 2016-12-26.
9. Christopher Orr (2016-01-22). "Review: In 'The Lady in the Van,' Maggie Smith Dazzles Yet Again". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2017-03-31.
10. Tucker, Reed (2015-11-28). "Why a playwright let a homeless woman live in his driveway for 15 years | New York Post". Nypost.com. Retrieved 2016-12-26.
11. "The Lady in the Van Press Conference in Full – Maggie Smith & Alan Bennett". YouTube. 2015-10-13. Retrieved 2016-12-26.
12. William Miller, Gloucester Crescent: Me, My Dad and Other Grown-Ups, Profile Books (2018)
13. Claire Tomalin, A Life of My Own, Viking (2017)
14. Jonathan Miller says farewell to Britain’s cleverest street – The Oldie 28 November 2019
15. Colvin, Clare (2011) [2009]. "Haycraft [née Lindholm], Anna Margaret [pseud. Alice Thomas Ellis]". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/97587. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
16. My love letter to Gloucester Crescent: Author William Miller on what it was like growing up in the bohemian NW1 enclave – Kentish Towner website
17. Lionel Percy Smythe – Barnsley Art on Your Doorstep (2014)
18. Profile of Lionel Percy Smythe (1839–1918) – Royal Museums Greenwich Collection
19. Almost Famous: website of Nina Stibbe
20. Book Review: Gloucester Crescent by William Miller – The Jewish Chronicle
21. Jonathan Wolfe Miller – Companies House database
22. The Camden Town Group in Context – A History of Camden Town 1895–1914 – Tate
23. Letter from Ursula Vaughan Williams to Alan Bush – Letter No.: VWL3696 – The Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams database
24. Gloucester Crescent by William Miller review – my dad Jonathan Miller and me – The Guardian 24 August 2018
25. Kate Bassett, In Two Minds: a Biography of Jonathan Miller: A Biography of Jonathan Miller, Oberon Books Ltd (2012) – Google Books p. 124
26. "Deborah Moggach: 'I'd like to die listening to Wodehouse'". The Times. 28 June 2019. (subscription required)