When a decrepit van, filled with a homeless old lady’s flotsam and jetsam, appeared with a film crew on Gloucester Crescent, 25 years after a similar vehicle had last been seen there, it proved a popular addition to the street for two people in particular.
“Camden Town is party central and when the crew turned up on one Monday morning they found a couple who’d been having a good time in the van,” says director Nicholas Hytner. “They’d apparently been there all weekend.
“When I arrived a little later they were evacuating the van of all its filthy contents - which were obviously just fake filthy, art department filthy - to have them deep cleaned because they had no idea what these two youngsters had been doing.
“Everything had to get deep cleaned and then made filthy again, and I had to keep from Maggie [Smith] why we were suddenly swapping the schedule for the whole day.”
Smith, who plays Miss Shepherd, the lead role in the The Lady in the Van, acknowledges that she was kept in the dark. “I was told much later,” she says. “Cowards.”
London oasis
Gloucester Crescent, in Camden Town, north London, is a unique street, says producer Kevin Loader.
“It’s sandwiched between Regents Park, a railway line, and the ever-moving stream of activity that is Camden High Street and market,” Loader says. “It’s an oasis, inhabited by creative, liberal-minded, quite well-off but kindly people.”
That liberal-mindedness was tested twice by the lady in the van: firstly, from the late 1960s to 1989, when the cantankerous and malodorous Miss Shepherd inhabited the street, and playwright Alan Bennett’s driveway; and secondly for five weeks in late 2014 and early 2015, when filmmakers descended to recreate the experience.
The residents came up trumps both times. “They tolerated Miss Shepherd for a number of years and they tolerated us,” Loader says.
The movie version of Bennett’s play about how he invited Miss Shepherd to park in his driveway for a few months, only for her to stay 15 years, was shot in and around no.23, Bennett’s house, which he still owned but no longer inhabited.
“If I had still lived there, it would have been a nightmare,” Bennett says. “With the best will in the world, film crews always cause chaos.”
For the creative team it was imperative that the movie be shot at the original site, telling the story from Bennett’s authentic view of the lady in the van. For the actors, such as Alex Jennings, there couldn’t have been a better setting.
“It was amazing to be sitting at his [Bennett’s] desk, in his window, with the van back in the driveway,” Jennings says. “It was an immense help with your imagination.”
Changing times
Fortunately for the filmmakers, Gloucester Crescent is in a conservation area, and the houses were almost unchanged since the 1960s. However, the blocked-off street did undergo some rapid transformations during shooting, hosting a 15-year succession of fashions and vehicles over five weeks.
Miss Shepherd’s costumes moved with the times thanks to costume designer Natalie Ward. Or slightly behind the times, as Hytner explains.
“Miss Shepherd had a strange taste, but like everything else it was a definite taste,” Hytner says. “It did move with the period as she tended to wear whatever she could get her hands on and whatever she was given, which tended to be what someone else was throwing out. It was often the thing that was five or six years out of date.”
Miss Shepherd’s vans had to be authentic for the period too. Finding them wasn’t easy, says Loader.
“They were not the best-built vehicles ever so the ones that survive are collectors’ items,” Loader says. “We had to pay quite a lot of money to very meticulous, very keen van collectors, and then trash these vehicles immediately when we got them. They would have been heartbroken to see it.”
An English story
Filming wasn’t just a blast from the past for the residents. It brought Hytner full circle to when he was a young director, living in north London in the early 1980s. He would often walk down Gloucester Crescent and notice the lady and the van outside what he knew was Bennett’s house.
“I wondered briefly if she was his mother,” Hytner says. “But then I thought, he can’t be keeping his mother in a van in the drive.”
When Hytner finally got to visit no.23, to work with Bennett on their first collaboration, The Wind in the Willows stage play, it was 1989. Miss Shepherd had recently died, the van was gone, and Hytner was still none the wiser.
“It didn’t occur to me to ask what that yellow van was. I later discovered nobody asked him what the van was, even when it was there. The English are too polite.”
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