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.
An end-of-terrace house, it still has little front and back gardens and ten steps leading up to the front door.
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