I moved to Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town, in 1969. At £11,500, so then hardly a snip, no. 23 was cheaper than some of the other houses because, imposing and double-fronted though it was and built in 1840, it was smaller than most of the villas in the Crescent and so was unsuitable for the young couples with children who were beginning to colonise this part of North London. Built as superior dwellings for the Victorian middle class, the street coincided with the railways that were then being driven through Camden Town (as inDombey and Son) and, partly as a result, the neighbourhood had gone steadily downhill since, particularly during the Second World War, when many of the villas had been turned into rooming houses. My own house had gas meters in all the upstairs rooms that were a relic of its lodging past and which could still overlap with the present. Early on in my occupancy I opened the door one evening to an old man who was looking for a room there, where he had lodged years ago. At that time I was doing a weekly stint on Ned Sherrin’s TV programmeThe Late Show and the old man (played by John Bird) became the central character in a film in which gentrified neighbours with the relics of a social conscience toured Camden Town (in, absurdly, a Rolls-Royce) trying to find other as yet ungentrified lodgings where he would find a welcome. He ended up in the local Rowton House.
Though in 1969 there were no longer any lodging houses in the Crescent some council properties survived (which they happily still do), except that given the Thatcherite policy of selling off council tenancies, plus the current financial pressures on local authorities, the status of such properties can hardly be secure. It’s a form of social cleansing that has been to the detriment of the street, which is these days more homogenous … and homogenously rich … than it has ever been.
When I moved in the residents were a mixed bag, with among the earliest to put down roots the artist David Gentleman and his wife, who are still there more than fifty years later. There were journalists like the late Nicholas Tomalin and Claire, his biographer wife, novelists like Nicholas Mosley and Alice Thomas Ellis with her publisher husband, Colin Haycraft, together with Jonathan Miller and his wife, Rachel, who had first seen the For Sale sign go up on no. 23 and alerted me. There was an ex-Yugoslav diplomat, a retired naval commander, the widow of Vaughan Williams, the composer, and round the corner in Regent’s Park Terrace the novelist Angus Wilson and his partner, Tony Garrett, who were a few doors along from perhaps the most distinguished denizen of all, the writer and critic V. S. Pritchett. Oh and there was also a bishop, the Anglican Bishop of Edmonton.
What had brought them to this corner of London was that it was unsmart, relatively quiet and handy for Regent’s Park and the West End. When I was acting in the theatre I could cycle down to Shaftesbury Avenue in twenty minutes and to the BBC in Portland Place even more quickly. The shopping was good, Inverness Street market just round the corner with a dairy, a bakery and a cobbler’s all in the same parade and a nearby assortment of Italian and Asian grocers, a wet fish shop, a couple of bookshops and half a dozen second-hand furniture and junk shops. What there was not was Camden Lock, which in the intervening years has swallowed up the indigenous shops and made the area simply a tourist venue.
Included now are excerpts from my diary for 2014 leading up to the making of the film ofThe Lady in the Van that October, with some interpolations from the introduction to the stage play (1999).
I’ve learned never entirely to believe in a film until it actually happens but it does seem likely that this autumn we will be shootingThe Lady in the Van. This is the story of Miss Mary Shepherd, the elderly eccentric who took up residence in my garden in 1974, living there in a van until her death fifteen years later. Maggie Smith played Miss Shepherd on the stage in 1999 and all being well will star in the film with Nicholas Hytner directing. To date I’ve written two drafts of the script and am halfway through a third.
The house where the story happened is currently lived in by the photographer Antony Crolla though many of my belongings are still in situ. This afternoon I go round to start the lengthy process of clearing out some of the books and papers so that it can be used for filming.
I first saw the house in 1968. It belonged to an American woman who kept parrots and there were perches in the downstairs room and also in its small garden.
I did most of the decorating myself, picking out the blurred and whitewashed frieze in the drawing room with a nail file, a job that these days would be done by steam cleaning, whereas then I was helped by some of the actors in my first play,Forty Years On, which was running in the West End. One of the actors was George Fenton, who is doing the music for the film, and another was Keith McNally, the proprietor of Balthazar.
The wal
