Gloucester Crescent is a shallow bow of Victorian houses between Camden Town and Regent's Park Road. Architecturally it is a good, coherent piece of 1840s speculative building. Its wider fame rests on something else entirely: for about half a century from the early 1960s it housed an unusual density of writers, broadcasters, editors and directors, and it has been written about by its own residents more thoroughly than almost any other street in London.
Henry Bassett's Italian idea
The crescent was built in the 1840s to designs by the architect Henry Bassett, in the Italianate manner then coming into fashion for London suburbs. The houses have the vocabulary of that style — shallow pediments, wide eaves, stuccoed detail, and in places towers with loggias — and the arrangement is said to have owed something to Bassett's travels in Italy. Much of the crescent is now Grade II listed, in long runs of terrace as well as individual houses.
The curve does the work that a straight terrace could not. It gives every house a slightly different aspect, breaks the sightline so the street reads as a sequence rather than a wall, and creates the deep front gardens and driveways that later became part of the street's story.
Dickens, Sickert and the earlier residents
Camden Town in the mid-nineteenth century was respectable rather than fashionable, and the crescent's early occupants reflect that. Catherine Dickens, separated from Charles Dickens in 1858, came to live in the crescent, and other members of the Dickens family followed her there. The painter Walter Sickert is recorded in the street in the years before the First World War, at a period when Camden Town had given its name to the group of painters gathered around him. A founding professor of the Guildhall School of Music also lived on the crescent for decades either side of 1900.
How it became "Britain's cleverest street"
From the early 1960s the crescent acquired a reputation it has never entirely shaken. Jonathan Miller — doctor, director, broadcaster and one of the Beyond the Fringe generation — moved in at the start of the decade and stayed for the rest of his life. Claire Tomalin and Nicholas Tomalin arrived at much the same time, and Michael Frayn later lived at the same address. The jazz singer and writer George Melly was there through the later 1960s. The novelist Alice Thomas Ellis lived on the crescent for some forty years. Alan Bennett bought a house there and remained for about four decades.
Others associated with the street over the same period include the novelist Deborah Moggach, the critic Susannah Clapp, the theatre director Max Stafford-Clark, the film director Stephen Frears and the editor Mary-Kay Wilmers. The press nickname "Britain's cleverest street" attached itself somewhere along the way, and has been used, usually with a degree of irony, by the residents themselves.
That version of the street has since been examined from the inside. William Miller, Jonathan Miller's son, published a memoir titled after the crescent in 2018, describing what it was like to grow up as a child among those particular grown-ups — a corrective, in places, to the idea of an effortless bohemian idyll.
The lady in the van
The best-known episode in the street's history began when a woman known to Alan Bennett as Miss Shepherd, later identified as Margaret Fairchild, began parking her van in the crescent. In the mid-1970s she moved the van into Bennett's driveway, where she remained for about fifteen years, through a succession of vehicles, until her death at the end of the 1980s.
Bennett wrote the story up as a memoir in the London Review of Books in 1989, published as a book the following year. It became a stage play in 1999 with Maggie Smith in the title role, and a film in 2015, parts of which were shot in the crescent itself. It is the rare case of a London street whose most famous resident was, strictly speaking, parked in it.
A listed street with a maintenance problem
Listing has preserved the crescent's elevations but has not stopped the ordinary problems of ageing stucco, timber sash windows and Victorian roof structures. The house associated with the lady in the van has been the subject of local press reports about its deteriorating condition, and the same pressures apply along the terrace: repair of soft render, structural movement in bay fronts, and the balancing of modern comfort against consent for listed fabric. That, rather than the celebrity roll-call, is the crescent's present-day story.