Finding Pooter’s house

Harry Mount traces the fictional tracks of Charles Pooter

These days, Charles Pooter, the City clerk and narrator of George and Weedon Grossmith’s The Diary of a Nobody (1892) — the enduring comedy of hum-drum middle-class, late-19th-century life — could never afford to rent (or buy) his six-bedroom house, The Laurels, in Brickfield Terrace, Holloway. The Pooters of this world fled north London a long time ago, driven to the commuter belt by soaring property prices. However big the collapse of the housing market, the Pooters could not possibly buy their way back to those comfortable years of meat teas, live-in maids, and champagne from Jackson Frères at three and six a bottle.

In the City these days, even a head clerk like Mr Pooter couldn’t expect to earn much more than £40,000; in the book, he gets into a terrible state when he loses £20 in shares in Parachikka Chlorates. Holloway is now banker land — even post-Lehmans, you won’t get into The Laurels for much under £1 million.

The Pooters may have left, but The Laurels survives. Ever since I read the book as a teenager, growing up near Holloway, I have kept an eye out for the house, so precisely drawn in the book by Weedon Grossmith (1853–1919), and described by his brother, George (1847–1912).

And then, suddenly, by accident, this summer I stumbled across The Laurels, on the way home from lunch with my sister on the Holloway/Dartmouth Park borders. A roof extension apart, the house in Pemberton Gardens — a cut-through from Holloway Road to Junction Road, built in 1865 by George Truefitt, surveyor to Henry Tufnell, owner of the Tufnell Park Estate — is the near spitting image.

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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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