THere are many interesting photos throughout the Book, including one of Miss Shepherd's horrible van, and lots of photos of the various intellectuals living in the Crescent. What comes across very strongly is William's father's personality and his father's strong opinions. These reject the idea of perpetuating class - the class system. Jonathan went to a public school and onto Cambridge, and spoke with an incredibly posh accent. At Cambridge, he was able to meet a large number of young men and a small number of women just like himself. He could see that the public school system was very wrong and divisive so he decided to send his own children to the local state schools. This is fine when the children are small, and get help at home, but later on his children, especially William, suffered from being threatened horribly by bullies, and could have achieved a lot more than they did, we infer, if the classrooms not been merry hell. The freedoms that the children enjoyed when they ran around to each other's houses reminded me of the children of the more Bohemian parents at my private primary. They were slightly frightening, because they were too grown-up for children. Their parents were not the protective sort. William seems to have looked for his nurturing in othr people's homes, with mixed results. Set behind gates, is this fully-redecorated three bedroom house designed by John Glew, ideal for family living and entertaining, that offers a very charming yet minimalistic design with a lateral feel.

That Alan Bennett came round to dinner every night. Every night. And brought milk puddings. And brunch on Sundays. You can understand how perplexed I am. At no point does Alan seem to stop going to the Millers' and start to go to Mary-Kay's. Did he eat two dinners every evening, and if so why? did he not put on weight? a b Historic England. "23, Gloucester Crescent(Grade II) (1342077)". National Heritage List for England.No wonder Gloucester Crescent, eminently satirisable, has been immortalised so often. Bennett wrote a TV soap opera, Life and Times in NW1, in the 1960s. Then, in his The Lady in the Van, on stage and screen, Dame Maggie Smith made a heroine of Miss Shepherd. Lately there was Love, Nina, by Nina Stibbe, au pair to Mary-Kay Wilmers, owner and editor of the London Review of Books (who, with her husband, film director Stephen Frears, bought the Mellys’ house in 1971). My mother was doing her residency at the Royal Free, and this was an affordable street that was equidistant between the two hospitals. Miller’s book is part of a second wave of Crescentology that includes The House in France by Gully Wells (daughter of Dee Wells, Ayer’s second and fourth wife – do keep up), and Nina Stibbe’s idiosyncratically funny collection of letters, Love, Nina, about being nanny to Wilmers’ children (whose father is Stephen Frears). Miller does not attempt to compete as a writer – wisely, as Stibbe has more style in a throwaway sentence than he does in whole paragraphs. Neither, except for a section involving Princess Margaret, does he try to be funny (it is hard not to think of his father’s warning “that if I ever tried telling any of his jokes I would hear him in my head screaming, ‘For Christ’s sake don’t tell that joke!’”). Rather, he is plain and direct, valiant in transparency about himself and the adults around him – so valiant, in fact, that I started looking people up to see if they were dead, and wondering about his publisher’s legal arrangements. Park and its grounds made way for large semidetached villas in Westbourne Park Road and, beside the railway, Westbourne Park Villas. (fn. 59) No. 16 villas were rapidly making way for shops, 'unsurpassed by any in London'. (fn. 87) The growth of Bayswater attracted tradesmen from London and led

But that again is not the whole story, and arguably would perpetuate the kind of prejudice William describes his father bringing to bear on everyone of whom he disapproved. Because this often gauche but deeply felt memoir is about a particular kind of pain – of failure, of the anxiety of influence writ through an entire life. Few can relate to being Jonathan Miller’s son, but in detailing the specifics, William points to universals: a child’s need for open-minded attention; a teenager’s to find their own kind. How desperation to fulfil parental expectations can lead to a damaging loss of self. And above all, of everyone’s need to be heard – for which, 40 years on, this is William Miller’s very public bid. This was before the Clean Air Act and there was unbelievable squalor – there was soot from the railways on everything. A lot of the houses had bedsits in them, and there were also interesting, radical people coming in to live here.” Letter from Ursula Vaughan Williams to Alan Bush – Letter No.: VWL3696 – The Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams database Talbot Road. (fn. 71) Westbourne Grove West lay in Kensington until 1900, when its north side was transferred to Paddington; it included Norfolk Terrace

to the boundary, and those to the east lie in the Bayswater area. (fn. 120) North of the railway, rebuilding has Bennett, Alan (24 February 1994). " 'The Stringalongs' ". London Review of Books . Retrieved 27 November 2021. We hear of Melly’s parties, where he’d play a game called Man, Woman, Bulldog. It entailed him dropping his trousers and using his lower anatomy to do impressions. Principal photography for the film version The Lady in the Van (2015) began at 23 Gloucester Crescent [12] [13] 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. Once, when William Miller was about five, his parents went away and his father’s assistant took him to stay with her own parents, who lived in a castle in Wales. He had a brilliant time, and would return often. When he tried to tell his father why he enjoyed these trips, he was handed a book on the slave trade: that was the source of most upper-class money. Upper-class people were invariably Tory, and thus automatically on his father’s “bad” list; many were antisemitic, too. Also, they were unreliable. But William liked his new friends because they were kind and generous. Because they listened to him. And because “of all the people I know, I can trust them not to let me down”.

To be fair, his parents and their friends occupied a particular, and, it turns out, finite, cultural and political moment: a time, almost unimaginable now, when one brilliant TV show (by a denizen of Gloucester Crescent), or a column in a paper (ditto) or new book (ditto ditto) could transfix a significant part of the nation. A time when it was possible to make a living writing; before feminism had made an impact on ambitious arty men who automatically expected their often equally brilliant wives to do all the cooking and child-rearing (“I thought I had some capacities,” as Tomalin once put it, midway through rearing five children while her husband wrote and played football in the park, and played away in other ways, “and here they were going down the plughole with the soapsuds.”) They also believed, passionately, in the possibility, post-second world war, of a cradle-to-grave welfare state, and in the NHS; they believed in Labour, and especially in the ideal of a different kind of education than they – privately and most Oxbridge-educated – had received themselves.It meant I could live in close proximity to my dad on a completely different basis. I see my mum every day and I see my dad having a fag on the steps. You become blasé about seeing them and I like that. I am closer to them than I ever have been.” House. There was also a short row, later called Belsize Villas, alone to the west on the south side of Miller lived a life of privilege, and being taken by his father to work meant watching rehearsals of Così Fan Tutte. Nevertheless, there are vivid passages describing pre-adult angst: the fear of being bullied, of losing his mother to cancer, of nuclear war, and of waiting for exam results. No. 55: the journalist and musician George Melly (1926–2007) from 1964 to 1971. [21] 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. [22]