Joyce Lankester Brisley was an English writer who lived at 108, Lewin Road. She is most noted for writing and illustrating the Milly-Molly-Mandy series of children’s books, first printed in 1925 by the Christian Science Monitor. Millicent Margaret Amanda is the main character in each book of short stories about the little girl in the pink-and-blue striped dress. Brisley studied in Brixton at the Lambeth School of Art alongside her sisters, who were also illustrators. More
Robert Williams Buchanan, the Scottish poet and novelist lived at 90 Lewin Road. He enjoyed some success writing for the stage, collaborating with Charles Gibbon on The Rathboys (1862) and having a verse-play entitled The Witch-Finder produced at Sadler's Wells two years later. His circle of literary acquaintances expanded to include G. H. Lewes, George Eliot, Robert Browning, and Charles Dickens, the last of whom accepted some contributions to All the Year Round. All the Year Round was a weekly literary magazine founded and owned by Charles Dickens, published between 1859 and 1895.
From 1876, Buchanan wrote or collaborated on no fewer than forty-seven more plays during the remaining twenty-seven years of his life - seven in 1890 alone - and published a further twenty-four novels. His plays include adaptations of his own novels The Shadow of the Sword and God and the Man, plus a version of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment called The Sixth Commandment (1890). He spent the last few years of his life in Streatham, where he unfortunately had a paralytic seizure, from which he never recovered. He was buried in Southend on Sea in a family grave.
Lord Byron - Streatham Academy occupied 418/420 Streatham High Road, facing Streatham Common. It is claimed Lord Byron was an alumnus of the academy, and carved his initials on an outbuilding. The Academy was demolished in 1925 and replaced by shops and flats. Byron Close in the vicinity of the School is named in honour of the poet. Byron was considered one of the leading figures in the Romantic Movement, an era in cultural history where emphasis was placed upon emotion and the glorification of the past and nature- it was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, and the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of the Enlightenment.
Ethel May Dell Savage was born at "Ferndale", 4 Polworth Road. She was a British writer known by her pen name, Ethel M. Dell. She wrote over 30 popular romance novels and several short stories from 1911 to 1939, including The Way of an Eagle and The Keeper of the Door series. Whilst readers adored her novels, critics hated them with a passion, but she did not care what the critics thought. She considered herself a good storyteller – nothing more and nothing less.
Aleister Crowley lived with his widowed mother at 7 Polworth Road. Mystic, novelist, chess player, writer and double agent during WW2, Crowley was dubbed by the press of the day as 'the most evil man in Britain'. In the 1930s Crowley conducted black magic rituals and orgies at his 'temple' on Fulham Road. He founded the religion of Thelema, identifying himself as a prophet. A prolific writer, he published widely over the course of his life. His most famous piece of literature is The Book of the Law, the central sacred text of Thelema, allegedly dictated to Aleister by a preternatural being calling himself Aiwass.
Leila Berg lived at 25 South Side Streatham Common. She was an English children's author but was also known as a journalist and a writer on education and children's rights. In the 1960s, Berg began writing in a more realistic and gritty style for children and with her Nippers series of reading primers, moved away from the bland style of Janet and John, making children’s literature more comparable to ordinary, real, urban life. She was an outspoken champion of comprehensive education and was awarded the Elanor Farjeon Award in 1974 for her services to children’s books.
Josephine Tey lived at 235 Covington Way, the house belonged to her sister. Josephine They was a pseudonym used by Elizabeth Mackintosh; a Scottish author best known for her mystery novels, including The Daughter of Time, voted the greatest mystery novel of all time by the Crime Writer’s Association in 1990, and A Shilling for Candles, which provided the basis for Hitchcock’s 1937 film, Young and Innocent. She also wrote as Gordon Daviot, under which name she wrote plays, many with biblical or historical themes.
Tey lived with her sister for the last few years of her life, moving from Inverness, her birthplace. Many of her theatre friends, including Dame Edith Evans (a founding member of the Streatham Shakespearean Players) and Sir John Gielgud, attended her funeral service at Streatham Vale Crematorium on Monday, 18th February 1952.
Sir Kingsley William Amis lived at 18 Buckingham Gardens (see plaque which should say lived not born!). He was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. Originally born in Clapham, Amis was raised in Norbury before moving out of the city to Berkhamsted. He was awarded a scholarship to Oxford University, where he studied English. Across his literary career, Amis wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism. He was best known for his satirical comedies, such as One Fat Englishman (1963), Jake’s Thing (1978) and The Old Devils (1986). In 2008, The Times ranked him ninth on a list of 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Beryl Kingston was born in Longley Road Tooting but lived at 17 Strathbrook Road (near the top) from 1956 to 1980. She was Secretary of Streatham CND for 10 years and she taught English at Rosa Bassett School in Streatham from 1952 to 1985, before becoming a full-time writer. Her first book was published in 1985 and was an instant bestseller. From then on she wrote a best seller every year for the next 14 years. Some of her novels are family sagas like Hearts and Farthings and its sequel, Kisses and Ha’pennies. Some are modern stories like Laura’s Way and Maggie’s Boy, some are historical novels set in the 20th, 19th, or 18th century, and some are war stories like A Time to Love and Avalanche of Daisies‘ which feature WW1 and WW2. She was awarded the Blake Society Tithe Grant Award in 2014, for the aphorism ‘Incorruptible plastic proves the value of decay’.
VS Naipaul lodged for two and a half years at 81a Wyatt Park Road. He was there from mid-1958 to the end of 1961. Most of his book, A House of Mr Biswas, which won him the 2001 Nobel Prize for literature, was written here, and he also wrote his first travel book, The Middle Passage, while living in Streatham. He wrote "Often, out in the Streatham Hill streets, momentarily away from the book, shopping perhaps, I thought: If someone were to offer me a million pounds on condition that I leave the book unfinished, I would turn the money down.... The two years spent on this novel in Streatham Hill remain the most consuming, the most fulfilled, the happiest years of my life. They were my Eden."
Raymond Thornton Chandler, the American-born novelist of detective fiction lived at 35 Mount Nod Road (the house currently on the site is not the same house). Chandler was considered to be a founder of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, publishing seven novels in his lifetime, and all but Playback have been made into motion pictures. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America.
Namba Roy a Jamaican novelist, born in Kingston, Jamaica settled in South London after WW2. Black Albino (1961), his first novel, is based on an episode of violent disunity among the Maroons during the eighteenth century. Following his discharge from the Merchant Navy in 1944, he lived in London, working in various capacities and producing his highly regarded paintings and sculptures, of which he exhibited both in London and Paris. A further novel entitled No Black Sparrows appeared posthumously in 1989; its narrative of abandoned children who live as pedlars on the streets of Kingston compellingly evokes the society of colonial Jamaica in the 1930s. Namba Roy Close which was named after Roy can be found off Valley Road.
Jane Austen, the acclaimed eighteenth-century novelist and writer of Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Sense and Sensibility to name a few, made several visits to Streatham to see her friend, Catherine Bigg-Wither, the wife of the then Rector of Streatham (St Leonard's), the Rev. Herbert Hill. Hill was also the founder of St Leonard’s School. Six months before she died, Jane wrote to Catherine’s sister, Alethea, who was staying at Streatham Rectory, mentioning by name each of the Rector’s children:
“I hope this will find all the Streatham party well, neither carried away by the Floods nor rheumatic through the Damps. Kind love & good wishes for a happy New Year to you all, from all our four here. Give our love to the little Boys, if they can be persuaded to remember us. We have not at all forgot Herbert’s & Errol’s fine Countenances. Georgiana is very pretty I dare say. How does Edward like school? I suppose his holidays are not over yet.”
Robert Southey the Poet Laureate was another visitor to the Rectory. He was the nephew of Rev. Southey and wrote Goldilocks and the Three Bears in 1837 to entertain his uncle's children. A serving PM, Lord John Russell, brother to the rector Wriothesley Russell, drafted the Reform Bill in the Rectory Library.
Dennis Wheatley was an English writer whose prolific output of thrillers and occult novels made him one of the world's best-selling authors from the 1930s through the 1960s. His Gregory Sallust series was one of the main inspirations for Ian Fleming's James Bond stories. He lived at a number of locations inStreatham and the only house still in existence is his last residence in Streatham. Ironically 1 Becmead Avenue, once the residence of the author of The Devil Rides Out, today is the St Leonard’s Church rectory.
Angela Carter, novelist, attended Streatham and Clapham High School in the 1950s. Angela Carter’s novels and short stories remain highly influential for their dark, humorous and often surreal portrayal of feminist ideas. Her most well-known work was The Bloody Chamber, a collection of short stories in which the stories all share a theme of being closely based on fairy tales. Her home in Clapham, where she lived for the last 16 years of her life, has now been commemorated with an English Heritage blue plaque. The school has named one their houses in honour of Carter.
Siobhan Dowd was brought up in Streatham and lived at 8 Abbotswood Road. A British writer and activist, she was responsible for running writing programmes for marginalised young people. The last book she completed, “Bog Child”, posthumously won the 2009 Carnegie Medal, voted by librarians as the year's best book for children or young adults published in the U.K. The book is set in the Troubles of Northern Ireland and follows an 18 year old boy who faces trauma whilst living in a hopeless situation.
William Sansom, 35 Becmead Ave. William Norman Trevor Sansom was born Norman Trevor Sansom (18 January 1912 – 20 April 1976). He was a British novelist, travel and short story writer known for his highly descriptive prose style.
Streatham Park/Place, a Georgian country mansion was demolished in 1863 but was visited by many notable 18th-century people. It was the ‘hang-out spot’ of the ‘Streatham Worthies’, a literary and cultural circle of friends of the notorious socialite and writer, Hester Thrale.
Amongst the group were the following writers:
Oliver Goldsmith - Irish novelist and playwright, best known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield
Giuseppe Marc’Antonio Baretti - literary critic and translator.
Dr Samuel Johnson - famous author of A Dictionary of the English Language, considered the pre-eminent British Dictionary before The Oxford English Dictionary was released 150 years later. He was also a lexicographer who had an apartment at the house.
Fanny Burney - satirical novelist, diarist and playwright and daughter of “Worthy” Dr Charles Burney and friend of Hester was also frequent visitor to the Thrale’s residence.
