From Dickens' dumped wife, to grisly murders and a vagrant in a van, one Camden street not only has a colourful history, but has starred in several books and films.
Gloucester Crescent was once dubbed 'Britain's cleverest street' due to the number of directors, writers, and musicians who moved there from the 1960s onwards.
Now, a Telegraph study in association with Knight Frank has named it one of the UK's top 50 streets to live on after taking in house prices, schools, green spaces, and the opinion of local estate agents.
Built in 1840, the street's first famous resident was Catherine Dickens, who moved into No. 70 in 1858 after scandalously separating from her novelist husband. She bore him 10 children, but he blamed her for their birth, which caused him financial woes, and took up with a younger woman, claiming she was an incompetent mother and banning her children from seeing her. Wronged and forgotten, she died in Gloucester Crescent in 1879, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery.
The artist Walter Sickert lived for a time at No. 68 in 1912. A founding member of the Camden Town group of artists, his fondness for painting nude sex workers, including the victim of the 1907 Camden Town Murder, led some to suspect him of being Jack the Ripper.
Another gruesome murder took place at 1 Gloucester Crescent in October 1941 when 48-year-old widow Edith Eleanora Humphries was found in her night clothes with her throat cut. She was taken to hospital where she died.
The murder remains unsolved but it has been suggested the ARP warden was an early victim of the so-called 'blackout killer' Gordon Cummins, who was known to stay at an address in nearby St John's Wood.
When the bohemian left-leaning set of Oxbridge-educated intellectuals arrived in the 1960s they were drawn to the large, crumbling villas near Regent's Park, which sold for around £4,000 at that time. The Crescent was made up of boarding houses and a homeless hostel, but by 1964 was dubbed by resident and journalist Nicholas Tomalin 'trendy NW1'.
Opera director, writer and all-round polymath Jonathan Miller - part of Beyond The Fringe, with Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore - arrived at No. 63 in 1961 with his wife Helen. Bennett lived for a time in their basement before buying No. 23 when it came up for sale.
Ursula Vaughan Williams, the widow of composer Ralph, lived at No. 69, journalist and jazz musician George Melly at 55, and the writer Alice Thomas-Ellis at No. 22. When award-winning biographer Clare Tomalin and husband Nick lunched with friends on the Crescent they spied that No. 57 was for sale and bought it. Tomalin later lived there with her second husband playwright and novelist Michael Frayn.
Jonathan Miller's son William still lives on the Crescent and offered a child's eye view of the affairs, open marriages and sheer freedom of growing up on London's best-connected street in Gloucester Crescent: Me, My Dad and Other Grown-Ups.
Moving in to no. 55 in the early 1970s was film director Stephen Frears (The Lost King, Philomena, Dangerous Liaisions) and journalist Mary-Kay Wilmers.
A decade later, Nina Stibbe arrived to work as a nanny for the now divorced Wilmers and her two sons. Her hugely successful comic memoir, Love, Nina recounts borrowing tools from Miller, entertaining Bennett for dinner, and falling for Tomalin's 'manny'. The comic account of life on the culturally rich enclave was later turned into a television series starring Helena Bonham Carter.
But it is perhaps Bennett's long-term visitor 'Miss Shepherd', a vagrant who lived in various vans on his drive for 15 years, who is the street's most famous resident.
She turned out to be a gifted pianist whose real name was Margaret Fairchild and had spent time in an institution. Bennett, who also wrote The History Boys and The Madness of King George, wrote about her in his play (and later film) The Lady in The Van, starring Maggie Smith.
No. 23 sold in 2019 for just over £2 million after Bennett moved to a more central part of Primrose Hill, the same year that Miller died at the age of 85.
The most recent house to sell on the Crescent in June 2022 went for £5.85 million, well beyond the reach of most playwrights and opera directors. It seems unlikely it will ever be quite the same bohemian enclave again.
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