Finding Pooter’s house

Wednesday, 8th October 2008

Harry Mount traces the fictional tracks of Charles Pooter

An end-of-terrace house, it still has little front and back gardens and ten steps leading up to the front door. It has the same corniced classical porch, plastered lower ground floor, prominent breakfast parlour window, and chimney pots marking the border with the house next door.

At one point, Pooter gets annoyed with the grocer’s boy picking at the blisters of paint on that little side door to the left of the house, used by deliverymen. The little side door is still there, standing wide open on my visit. I nipped down the side passage to the garden that Mr Pooter was so proud of; in his entry for Sunday 8 April, he wrote: ‘Took a walk round the garden, and discovered a beautiful spot for sowing mustard-and-cress and radishes.’

From the garden, I took in the proportions of the house, built on a grand scale, with high ceilings and broad, deep rooms, accommodating not just Charles and Caroline Pooter and their wayward son, Lupin, but also their servants. These days, even a successful banker is unlikely to have, as Mr Pooter did, both a maid (Sarah) and a charwoman (Mrs Birrell).

Strolling down the wide, empty, tree-lined Pemberton Gardens, it was easy to recall the Pooter days. I even heard the rumble of the trains from the Goblin line, from Gospel Oak to Barking; what Mr Pooter knew as the Tottenham and Hampstead Junction Railway, the one that caused the cracks in his garden wall.

I went in search of Mr Pooter’s bête noire — the scraper that Cummings, Pooter’s office colleague, fell over after coming round to show him the Meerschaum pipe he’d won in a raffle in the City. ‘Must get the scraper removed or else I shall get into a scrape. I don’t often make jokes,’ said Pooter.

Mr Pooter can rest easy. The scraper is gone, now — a rare alteration to this time capsule of high Victorian comedy and prosperity.

Harry Mount’s A Lust for Window Sills — a lover’s guide to British buildings from portcullis to pebble-dash is published by Little, Brown (£12.99)

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Tim Johnson

October 15th, 2008 6:09pm Report this comment

How dare young Harry – a Barnsbury boy, not proper Holloway at all – claim Pemberton Gardens as the Pooters’ home? It's much too far out of town for a man of Mr Pooter’s stature, and he would be mortified to have only 10 steps up to the front door, instead of 14 as his Diary notes. I believe the true location is in the Penn Road area about half a mile closer to the City. The houses on the north side of Penn Road - originally known as Penn Villas - don’t look quite like the drawing although they do even better in having exaggerated frontages for their modest size. My pick for the original of the illustration is for one of the houses in Stock Orchard Crescent, just the other side of the Cally from Penn Road. Some of them also back onto the railway, which was another feature of The Laurels. Other geographical details in the Diary – such as closeness to Camden Road – support this identification.

Guy

February 27th, 2009 10:50am Report this comment

I also doubt that Pemberton Gardens is the right location. I went down it the other day, and the only house on the railway side that remotely resembles the frontispiece is No.1. However, there are striking differences: e.g. the house in the frontispiece has a single Georgian-style window on the raised ground floor, with a pseudo-Palladian architrave above it. 1PB has three small, narrow, windows, with rounded tops in the romanesque style. The proportions are also quite different.

A much closer match - indeed, a dead ringer - is to be found on Rochester Road in Camden - indeed a whole row of look-alike semi-detached houses. Rochester Road also leads directly off Camden Road. The only obvious discrepancy is that the nearest railway line is a couple of streets away. But maybe its location in the book, as well as that of the house, was just artistic licence...

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