London Fictions |
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The opening pages of both of Elizabeth Bowen’s best known novels are set in Regent’s Park. A slow walk round the boating lake constitutes the opening chapter of The Death of the Heart (1938). In The Heat of the Day, a concert in the park’s Open Air Theatre sets the scene for this rendition of a wartime, dislocated, disoriented city.
Bowen has been described as the ‘doyenne’ of Regent’s Park writers. She could see over the park from her sitting room at 2 Clarence Terrace, close to its south-west corner. This exceptional terrace – designed not by John Nash but by the young Decimus Burton – dates from the 1820s, the decade before the park was opened to the public. Elizabeth Bowen was an air raid warden during the war. Her home in Clarence Terrace was damaged in the Blitz of 1940 and again in the summer of 1944, when a bomb brought down the ceilings. She was obliged to move out while the property was rebuilt.
Much of The Heat of the Day is set on the southern fringes of Regent’s Park, and above all in Marylebone, which Bowen once described as ‘my village’. The area is now, as it was then, largely given over to mansion blocks, mews streets and white stucco propriety. Her topography in the novel is imprecise, for she is more concerned to capture a moment than a place – the London of the Blitz and its aftermath. Louie, a factory worker, has ‘a double first-floor room in one of those houses in Chilcombe Street’ close to Marylebone station, the last built, smallest and nicest of London’s mainline stations, where she could hear the ‘nocturnal train-sounds, shunting, clanking and hissing, from the network of Marylebone lines’. |
Stella Rodney lives in an altogether grander and more austere part of Marylebone, Weymouth Street, which runs east from the bustle of Marylebone High Street, across Wimpole Street, Harley Street and Portland Place before dissolving into the hinterland of Fitzrovia. ‘This fairly old house in Weymouth Street, of which her flat took up the top floor, was otherwise in professional, doctors’ and dentists’ occupation and was accordingly empty at weekends’.
Perhaps echoing the author’s own experience after being forced out of Clarence Terrace, Stella – living in a furnished flat– ‘had the irritation of being surrounded by somebody else’s irreproachable taste’. The street still has the slightly anonymous air of surgeries and smart apartments, and if Stella Rodney strolled down there today, she would find much that is familiar. - A.W., 2010 |