Although much altered and extended, this house was originally built in 1817 by a bottle merchant, and remained in the same family ownership for more than 150 years. 19th century tenants included a young army captain who was killed in the Waikoto Campaign in New Zealand in 1864.
The biographer Michael Holroyd spent the first two years of his life here in the 1930s, when his father was a director of Lalique glass. With the rise of Nazism, a Jewish friend came to stay after successfully smuggling his life savings out of Berlin concealed in a huge glass elephant table-lamp. Having picked up the consignment at the docks, he tried to break the beast open in the taxi, alerting the curiosity of the Jewish cab driver who produced a big spanner and smashed the elephant to bits, revealing the hoard. Cheers all round: his future was secure.
Neighbours included E. M. Forster, screenwriter and director Roland Pertwee and his Doctor Who son Jon, and author and artist Mervyn Peake.