Hilldrop Crescent in Islington, North London, might have existed on a different plane from intellectual Bloomsbury and the fashionable West End. The clattering traffic of the adjacent Caledonian and Holloway Roads bypassed it as surely as cultural subversion and Society sophistication. Its semi-detached houses – square, solid, entirely unremarkable – sheltered the kind of middle-class residents they had been built for. There, anonymity was not considered a mark of failure so much as a badge of respectability.
