Subject

The Marchmont Association thoroughly research their plaques and they found some interesting information about Barrie’s home:

“Barrie (1937) writes (in the third person) about his first residences in London in The Greenwood Hat: Being a Memoir of James Anon 1885-1887. Here we learn that after a brief period residing in Guilford Street in March/April 1885, he moved to cheaper lodgings at Grenville Street. According to the respected Mackail (1941), Barrie was at 8, Grenville Street in 1885, then again from September 1886 to August 1888. According to Barrie (1937: 20), Barrie ‘was in that Grenville Street house . . . off and on for years, sometimes in its finest apartments (all according to the state of his finances)’. Although Peter Pan was not written from his Grenville Street address, Barrie places the Darlings’ home in Grenville Street in his own words, in the first scene of the play ..., thus confirming that the ‘imaginary Bloomsbury’ of Peter Pan and the Darling family draws extensively on Barrie’s time at Grenville Street, in particular, in relation to the location of the Darlings’ family home, and its views overlooking Brunswick Square. The c.1929 image of 8-10 Grenville Street, cross-referenced to the Horwood map of 1799, shows that No. 8 was on the corner of Grenville Street and Bernard Street, with windows facing into Brunswick Square - a perfect fit with the narrative suggested by Barrie scholars. Grenville Street was never re-numbered and 8-10, Grenville Street, which had been a Nurses' Home run by the Throat Nose & Ear Hospital in Gray's Inn Road, was demolished in 1938 and replaced the following year by the present-day Downing Court.”

The house at the very left of the photo still exists in Grenville Street and is still a shop, at the corner with Colonnade.