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Authors - Kensington & Chelsea Walking Tour
London

Beatrix Potter, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde all called these elegant West London streets home. Find out what drew them here.

9 stops · 7 km

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Every Stop Has a Story

J.M. Barrie

J.M. Barrie wrote both Peter Pan and Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens while living in this 1820s villa, which has survived repeated threats of demolition.

Agatha Christie

Despite reportedly disliking this house, Agatha Christie lived here from 1930 to 1934 and wrote her first Miss Marple novel.

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie called this house her "happy home," the only one where she had a room entirely her own to write in, and here she wrote Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile.

James Joyce

James Joyce married Nora Barnacle and worked on Finnegans Wake during his six months in this flat, before press hounding drove him out and he left England for good, never to return.

T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot had already written The Waste Land and his other major works by the time he moved into this Kensington flat in 1957, where Groucho Marx came to dinner and was surprised to discover his host would rather talk about Marx Brothers films than literature.

Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter was born and raised in a house on this site, painting watercolors of the garden even as she watched Kensington urbanize around her, a change she came to loathe.

George Eliot

George Eliot spent her final weeks in this Queen Anne townhouse, built in 1718 on the site of the Tudor manor where Henry VIII once lived and the young Elizabeth I later stayed.

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest in this house, where his argument with the Marquess of Queensberry set off the chain of events that led to his arrest and imprisonment.

Ian Fleming

Ian Fleming lived in a flat here while working as a journalist, before being recruited into Naval Intelligence and playing a role in Operation Mincemeat, the real deception scheme now dramatized in a West End show.

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