Graham Greene
There is a very interesting short article about the time Greene spent living in the 1930s in a fine house on the north side of Clapham Common in South London. It is on the Clapham Society Local History website and is written by Peter Jefferson Smith and can be found at www.claphamsociety.com/articles/37-greeneland/
The beautiful Queen Anne era building, as well as the Clapham Common it fronts onto, feature prominently in the novel The End of the Affair (1951) and Greene’s cruel 1950s short story ‘The Destructors’. Greene also lived in Battersea next door to Clapham while he worked as a sub-editor on The Times newspaper before he got married. This location and the area around nearby Wandsworth Prison are authentically portrayed in It’s a Battlefield (1934) in all their original working-class seediness.
The blue commemorative plaque on the front of Greene ‘s house can just be made out in the picture. Its installation was thanks to a relentless campaign by the late Martin Jenkins, a long-standing Birthplace Trust member.