'From Plath to Moss, the high-energy classless have come to Primrose Hill'
Cristina Odone's diary
The Observer
Sunday October 16, 2005
Sylvia Plath wrote that she never wanted to leave her home in Primrose Hill.
She was living in a studio that had once housed WB Yeats and was inspired to
write poems that, she claimed in her letters home to America, would make her
name. The flat was a tip - small children, an undomesticated Ted Hughes - but
with a great view and a Sixties boho chic. For Plath, this leafy, unpretentious
corner of north London was a kind of Britain to fall in love with.
Forty years on, Primrose Hill and its inhabitants continue to be colourful, artsy,
messy, though not as desperate as Sylvia, who stuck her head in the gas oven
in that beloved studio. The cast these days is more lightweight: Sadie Frost
and Jude Law, Sienna Miller and Daniel Craig, Kate Moss and Helena Bonham Carter.
But if they don't have Ariel under their belt, and cannot boast the tormented
genius of a future poet laureate, these 21st-century artists are keeping up the
Hughes-Plath bohemian lifestyle.
They are nonconformist, in a non-religious way. Their love stories are overshadowed
by jealousy, infidelity, drink and drugs and smack of hell rather than Hello!.
Their work is no career - it's their passion, their spiritual haven, their torture.
Their clothes look shabby chic rather than couture. Their children are Montessori
rather than uniformed prep school.
There's a laid-back, accessible quality to the Primrose crowd, similar to the
one that made Britain famous during the Sixties. Then it was Terence Stamp, Michael
Caine, Twiggy: creative free spirits who didn't give a damn about social class
or convention and who hung about the King's Road, putting that bit of London
on the world's map.
Today, Kate and Jude and Sienna et al also feel as if they are part of a neighbourhood
rather than an incestuous elite. You can bump into them at the small, middle-European
bistros that dot the area, at the Triyoga where fellow clients try not to gawp
as the stars stretch into dog position, at the health food stores that smell
of essential oils. Yes, some may party hard (three-in-a-bed sex, lines of coke);
yes, they may be blessed with extraordinary looks and damned with louche appetites.
But they are reassuringly earthy, this lot. Even when Kate Moss had a lot to
hide from, she wasn't wearing shades at midnight the way brittle fashionistas
do; and Sadie Frost, even when her divorce from Jude Law was headline stuff,
would turn up at the school gates, bang on time.
They are a million miles removed from the Beverly Hills A list, with those nose
jobs for poodles and Armani aprons for the Filipina maid; and almost as alien
from the Notting Hill luvvies who do a fine line in self-deprecating humour to
camouflage their essential smugness.
Primrose Hill is not Richard Curtis country; it's not a Disneyesque pastiche of Britain as it should be for Hollywood consumption. It is home to a high-energy, ambitious, classless group whose nonconformism shows that some corner of Britain refuses to be pasteurised into a new Labour Cool Britannia vision or an
American picture postcard. The actors, models and designers who live in Primrose Hill do their own thing, breaking some rules (even the law) in the process. Their excesses are self-destructive, but their independence of spirit celebrates a kind of Britain that anyone could fall in love with, all over again.