Whilst out with a lovely group on my Georgian London tour in North Clerkenwell we were lucky enough to come across the BBC filming. When I asked the crew, and after being told they were filming Jeremy Kyle the movie I was informed they were filming a new miniseries of Howards End.
Back in February 2017 the BBC announced an all-star cast for Kenneth Lonergan’s adaption of Howards End for BBC One. This is to be Academy Award® nominated screenwriter and playwright Lonergan’s first TV screen adaption. The miniseries will consist of four hour-long episodes directed by Hettie Macdonald (White Girl).
Howards End was written by E. M. Forster, an English novelist, short story writer and essayist most famously known for A Passage to India (1924). He was born in Victorian London, in what is now Dorset Square. Before his second birthday his father had died of tuberculosis and he and his mother moved up to Rooksnest, near Stevenage, Hertfordshire which later served as a model for Howards End, because he held fond childhood memories from there.
Between 1897 and 1901, whilst studying at King’s College Cambridge, he became a member of a discussion society known as the Apostles, who met in secret, and discussed their work on and about philosophical and moral questions. Many of its members later became members of the Bloomsbury Group. Forster was no exception and was a peripheral member in the 1910s and 1920s.
About Howards End
Howards End was written and first published in 1910 and offers an extraordinary insightful glimpse into the life of England in the years before World War and attempts to answer the question “Who shall inherit England?” meaning, which class of English people would come to define the nation? by exploring the lives of three different groups of people, each representing a particular social class and aspect.
Howards End is considered by some to be Forster’s masterpiece. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Howards End 38th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
The Schlegel sisters of Howards End, representing the intellectual aspect of the upper classes are based, to some degree, on Vanessa and Virginia Stephen.
About Myddelton Square
Myddelton Square is the largest and grandest in Clerkenwell. The square and gardens is within Islington’s council’s designated New River Conservation Area, an area of special architectural and historic interest, the character or appearance of which it is desirable to preserve or enhance.
The New River Conservation Area is one of the largest in Islington and includes some of the finest terraces and squares in the Borough.
Mentions:
Joanna Lumley shares her authentic London gem with the Evening Standard (2015)
Peter Ibbetson, George Du Maurier (1892)
Notable Residents:
Thomas Dibdin – actor, playwright and stage manager of Sadler’s Wells Theatre
Golding Bird – medical doctor and Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians
Fenner Brockway – Pacifist and Labour MP lived in a commune during Fabian times.
Matt Zimmerman – Tracy in Thunderbirds
Jabez Bunting – Wesleyan Methodist minister
Filming in Myddelton Square:
Suffragettes, 2015- Meryl Streep rallies a group of impassioned Suffragettes
Unforgotten 2, 12017 – the action was all filmed from inside a car driving around the square.
Howards End, 2017 – postman crossing the road
