A bear named after a station
Michael Bond told the story many times. On Christmas Eve in the mid-1950s he came across a single toy bear left on a shelf in a London department store — usually named as Selfridges — bought it as a last present for his wife, and called it Paddington after the station near where the couple were then living. Bond was working as a BBC television cameraman at the time, and spent a period on Blue Peter. The bear sat about the flat for a while before it turned into anything.
Bond himself lived in Little Venice, not far from Paddington station, and died at home in June 2017 at the age of 91.
Collins, Peggy Fortnum and the first book
A Bear Called Paddington was published by Collins on 13 October 1958, illustrated by Peggy Fortnum, whose loose, scratchy pen line still governs what most British readers picture when they think of the bear. The story is simple enough to have survived every adaptation since: a bear arrives from darkest Peru, is found on a railway platform by Mr and Mrs Brown, and is taken home.
Television came later. FilmFair's stop-motion series began in 1976, with Bond writing the scripts and Michael Hordern narrating and voicing every part. Its visual trick — a three-dimensional puppet bear moving through rooms and streets made of flat cut-outs — gave the series an oddness that has aged rather well.
Windsor Gardens is not on the map
In the books the Browns live at 32 Windsor Gardens, and people have been hunting for it ever since. There is a real Windsor Gardens, a short cul-de-sac off the Harrow Road between Notting Hill and Maida Vale, but its numbering stops well short of 32 and it is generally accepted to have nothing to do with the fictional address. Bond placed the Browns in the Notting Hill area, and is said to have kept any real-life model for the house to himself so that its actual occupants would not be pestered.
Which means that, strictly speaking, Paddington is not a native of NW1 at all. He became one on screen.
Chalcot Crescent takes the part
For the Paddington films, the Brown family home and the street outside it were filmed on Chalcot Crescent in Primrose Hill, renamed Windsor Gardens for the purpose. The crescent was laid out between 1849 and 1860, with most of the building work happening around 1855, on land that had formed part of the old Chalcot estate — the same name that survives in Chalk Farm just up the road.
Its appeal to a location manager is obvious the moment you stand in it. The houses are three-storey terraces with brightly painted stucco fronts, cast-iron balconies and railings finished with fleur-de-lys finials, curving gently so that the whole run reads as one composition rather than a line of separate buildings. It is a storybook street that nobody had to build for the film.
Living inside a set
Most of the houses on Chalcot Crescent are Grade II listed, and the whole street sits within the Primrose Hill Conservation Area. That is the unglamorous reason it still looks the way the camera wants it to: the elevations, the sash windows, the railings and the stucco mouldings are all subject to control, and change on the front of these houses happens slowly and by agreement rather than at the whim of individual owners.
The result is a small London irony. A fictional address invented for west London is now, for a very large audience worldwide, unmistakably a north London street — and the terrace that plays it is protected in more or less the state the Victorians left it.