Gloucester Crescent is an 1840s Victorian residential crescent in Camden Town in London which from the early 1960s gained a bohemian reputation as “the trendiest street in London” and "Britain's cleverest street" when it became home for many British writers, artists and intellectuals including Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett and Alice Thomas Ellis. Many of the homes on the crescent are Grade II listed buildings including no. 23, the terraces nos. 3 to 22 and 24 to 29, and nos. 60 and 61. The London branch of the School of Sound Recording is located in The Rotunda at 42 Gloucester Crescent.
The former home of playwright and author Alan Bennett at 23 Gloucester Crescent is the setting for The Lady in the Van based on his experiences with the eccentric woman known to him as Miss Shepherd who lived on Bennett's driveway in a series of dilapidated vans for more than fifteen years. Fairchild/Shepherd's story was first published in 1989 as an essay in the London Review of Books. In 1990 Bennett published it in book form. In 1999 he adapted it into a stage play at the Queen's Theatre in London which starred Maggie Smith who received a Best Actress nomination at the 2000 Olivier Awards and which was directed by Nicholas Hytner. The stage play includes two characters named Alan Bennett. On 21 February 2009 it was broadcast as a radio play on BBC Radio 4, with Maggie Smith reprising her role and Alan Bennett playing himself. He adapted the story again for the 2015 film The Lady in the Van with Maggie Smith reprising her role again, and Nicholas Hytner directing again. Principal photography for the film versionThe Lady in the Van began at 23 Gloucester Crescent in 2014. The film was shot in and around Bennett's old house in Camden Town, where the real Miss Shepherd spent 15 years on his driveway. According to director Nicholas Hytner, they never considered filming anywhere else. In 2018 William Miller, son of Sir Jonathan Miller, published Gloucester Crescent: Me, My Dad and Other Grown-Ups based on his memories of growing up on Gloucester Crescent in the 1960s and the famous residents and visitors he encountered. The biographer Claire Tomalin published her autobiographyA Life of My Own which included much detail of her life on Gloucester Crescent where she has lived since the 1960s.
Notable residents
No 22: the writer and essayist Alice Thomas Ellis lived here from 1960 to 2001 with her husband the publisher Colin Haycraft until his death. Since 2001 the house has belonged to photographer and film directorMalcolm Venville.
No. 23: writer Alan Bennett and vagrant Margaret Fairchild lived at the Grade II listed building – Bennett in the house, and Fairchild in a series of dilapidated vans parked on the driveway, as immortalised in Bennett's memoir, stage play and film.
No. 55: the journalist and musician George Melly from 1964 to 1971. The writer Nina Stibbe wrote a hugely successful memoir, Love, Nina, about working as a nanny for the journalist Mary-Kay Wilmers and her then husband, film-director Stephen Frears who had bought the house from Melly in 1971.
No. 57: since 1963 the home of author Claire Tomalin and her husband journalist Nicholas Tomalin.
No. 63: the polymath Jonathan Miller and his family from 1961.
