Gloucester Crescent and the Beyond the Fringe generation
The Italianate villas of Gloucester Crescent were designed by the architect Henry Bassett and completed in the 1840s, speculative housing on the Primrose Hill side of Camden Town. From the early 1960s the street acquired a nickname — "Britain's cleverest street" — earned by the density of directors, writers and performers who bought into it while the houses were still cheap.
The theatrical roll-call is unusually concentrated:
- Jonathan Miller arrived at No. 63 in 1961 with his wife Helen and lived there until his death in 2019. Miller had appeared in Beyond the Fringe alongside Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore before turning to a long career directing theatre and opera.
- Alan Bennett lodged in the Millers' basement before buying No. 23 when it came up for sale, and remained on the crescent for more than forty years.
- Michael Frayn, the playwright, lived at No. 57 with the biographer Claire Tomalin, who had been there since 1963.
- Max Stafford-Clark, the theatre director, lived at No. 69, a house also occupied by Ursula Vaughan Williams.
- Stephen Frears, later the film director, took over No. 55 in 1971 from the jazz singer and writer George Melly, who had been there from 1964.
The poet and playwright Louis MacNeice, the novelist and screenwriter Deborah Moggach and the writer Alice Thomas Ellis, at No. 22 from 1960, were among the other residents. Many of the houses are listed Grade II.
The Lady in the Van: a driveway that became a stage set
The best-known theatrical work to come out of the neighbourhood was written about the neighbourhood itself. In 1974 Margaret Fairchild — known to Bennett and to readers as Miss Shepherd — moved a dilapidated van onto the driveway of 23 Gloucester Crescent, and stayed for fifteen years until her death.
Bennett first published the account as an essay in the London Review of Books in 1989, and in book form in 1990. It reached the stage in 1999 at the Queen's Theatre, with Maggie Smith as Miss Shepherd, directed by Nicholas Hytner. Smith returned to the part for the 2015 film, again directed by Hytner, which was shot at the real house on the crescent. It is a rare case of a north London street standing in for itself, decades after the events.
The Roundhouse as a theatre, not just a music venue
The Roundhouse at Chalk Farm is now thought of chiefly as a concert hall, but its second life began as a theatrical project. In 1964 the playwright Arnold Wesker established the Centre 42 Theatre Company in the disused railway engine shed, with the intention of creating a permanent cultural centre containing a theatre, cinema, gallery and workshops — an explicitly working-class arts venture rather than a commercial one.
Under the administrator George Hoskins the building became a significant home for experimental theatre, hosting work by the Living Theatre and by Peter Brook. Centre 42 eventually exhausted its funds; the Greater London Council transferred the building to Camden Council in 1983 and it closed. It was bought by Torquil Norman's trust in 1996 for £6 million, rebuilt at a cost of £27 million, and reopened as a theatre and music venue in 2006. The building is listed Grade II*.
The Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park
The nearest permanent stage to Primrose Hill sits in the Inner Circle of Regent's Park, a short walk south. It began almost by accident: the New Theatre in the West End (now the Noël Coward) was left without a show, and on 12 July 1932 the producer Robert Atkins and the critic and impresario Sydney Carroll transferred their production of Twelfth Night to Regent's Park for four performances. The first full summer season followed in 1933, with As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Vivien Leigh appeared there in 1936. It was one of only two London theatres — the other being the Windmill — to remain open throughout the Second World War. The present fixed amphitheatre was built in 1974 and substantially rebuilt in 1999; it seats 1,304 and runs an eighteen-week season attended by more than 140,000 people a year, making it the oldest permanent professional outdoor theatre in Britain.
Camden's other stage, and the audience next door
Camden Town also had a full-scale receiving house of its own. The Camden Theatre at 1a Camden High Street opened on Boxing Day 1900 to designs by W. G. R. Sprague, one of the largest theatres in London outside the West End with a capacity of 2,434. It became the Camden Hippodrome in 1909 and a picture theatre in 1913, closed during the war, and from 1945 served as a BBC radio and recording studio until 1972 — the year it was listed Grade II. It reopened as a music venue as the Music Machine in 1977, becoming Camden Palace in 1982 and KOKO in 2004.
The theatrical population has not entirely dispersed. The actor Derek Jacobi and the broadcaster Joan Bakewell are among those recorded as living in the Primrose Hill area, which continues to supply the West End with a quiet, walkable commuter belt roughly twenty minutes from Euston.