The Listener and the Stringalongs
By the late 1960s the link between this corner of London and the people who made British television was firm enough to be worth mocking. In August 1967 a strip called Life and Times in NW1 began in The Listener, the weekly magazine the BBC had founded in 1929 as the printed counterpart to its broadcast talks. It was drawn by Mark Boxer under his pen name Marc and written by Peter Preston, and it followed Simon and Joanna Stringalong, a fashionable upper-middle-class couple from the postcode. The British Cartoon Archive records that the Stringalongs grew out of characters in Alan Bennett's 1966 BBC series On the Margin, and that from 1969 they also appeared as a pocket cartoon in The Times.
The joke worked because readers already recognised the type. NW1 takes in Camden Town, Regent's Park and Primrose Hill, and in the post-war decades its large, then thoroughly unfashionable Victorian and Regency houses were being bought cheaply and reworked by writers, directors, producers and broadcasters. The cartoon did not invent that reputation. It recorded one that already existed.
Gloucester Crescent and its neighbours
No street carried the reputation more heavily than Gloucester Crescent, the Italianate curve laid out in the 1840s by the architect Henry Bassett between Camden Town and Primrose Hill, where most of the houses are now Grade II listed. The polymath and broadcaster Jonathan Miller moved to No. 63 in 1961. Alan Bennett lived at No. 23 for decades, and the woman who parked her van in his driveway eventually became The Lady in the Van. Others associated with the crescent include the biographer Claire Tomalin, the writer Michael Frayn, the jazz singer and critic George Melly, the director Stephen Frears and Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books. The Oldie has called it Britain's cleverest street, which is the sort of description a road only attracts once the legend has set.
Eggcups above the Regent's Canal
The most literal piece of television history in NW1 stands a short walk east, at Hawley Crescent just south of Camden Lock. TV-am won the national breakfast franchise in December 1980 and first broadcast on 1 February 1983 from a former car showroom that the architect Terry Farrell had converted into the Breakfast Television Centre. Farrell's postmodern remodelling gave the building a run of large plastic eggcups along the roofline facing the Regent's Canal, and an interior assembled from borrowed world architecture: a long central atrium, a staircase modelled on a ziggurat, a hospitality suite in the manner of a Japanese temple.
The station's first months were difficult, and its recovery is conventionally credited to a puppet rat. Roland Rat made his debut on 1 April 1983 and is widely held to have rescued the audience figures over that summer. TV-am ran for close to a decade before its final programme on 31 December 1992.
From breakfast television to Paramount
MTV Europe took on the building in 1993, so the eggcups outlived the programme that put them there. A fire in 1999 damaged the roof and part of the first floor, and a substantial redevelopment followed in the early 2010s, in which the original studio block was replaced by a glazed office building and the eggcups were repainted grey and white. The site now serves as Paramount's European headquarters and is the base for Channel 5. Three generations of broadcaster have therefore occupied one Camden yard inside four decades.
The neighbourhood playing itself
NW1 also turns up on screen as itself. Nina Stibbe's memoir Love, Nina, drawn from letters she wrote in the 1980s while working as a nanny in the Wilmers household on Gloucester Crescent, was adapted by Nick Hornby and shown on BBC One in 2016. A few streets west, the painted stucco of Chalcot Crescent stands in for Windsor Gardens in the Paddington films. Location managers keep coming back for much the same reason the Stringalongs' creators did: these streets look exactly like the idea of the place.