London's most famous parking space: Alan Bennett's 'Lady in the Van' house in Camden for sale for £3 million

Alan Bennett is selling the Gloucester Crescent house where the Lady in the Van lived in the driveway for 15 years.
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6 November 2017

Alan Bennett has put the ‘Lady in the Van’ house in Camden on the market for £3 million.

The playwright, 83, lived in the three-bedroom house at 23 Gloucester Crescent for about 40 years before moving to his current home in Primrose Hill.

He held off selling the property until now so that it could be used for the filming of the adaptation of his 1999 play ‘The Lady in the Van’, starring Maggie Smith.

The film and play tell the true story of the homeless woman, Miss Shepherd, who lived in a van in Bennett’s front garden from 1974 – when Camden council introduced parking restrictions – until her death 15 years later.

Bennett, a prolific diarist, described decorating the house with the help of some of the cast of his first play, Forty Years On, in extracts from his diary published in 2014.

“The walls of the sitting room and the study in Gloucester Crescent are just as I decorated them nearly half a century ago," he wrote in the London Review of Books.

"I have always been quite proud of my efforts, though aware over the years that the finish I achieved has often been thought eccentric.”

Bennett stained the original plaster walls himself, vibrant green in one room, terracotta in another.

Still from the film of the Lady in the Van, starring Maggie Smith as Miss Shepherd and Alex Jennings as Alan Bennett

There are original period details throughout the house including decorative cornices “picked out by Alan Bennett in 1969”, and fireplaces from 1840.

There is a walled garden with sunken patio area and double gates to what is surely one of London’s most literary parking spaces.

The house is on the market for £3,000,000 through David Birkett Estate Agents.

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