“See these tiles so green…”
So, a full decade after his ascension to that great Stardust in the sky, it’s been announced that one of David Bowie’s childhood homes is to be turned into a time-warp museum of sorts, restored back to its sixties aesthetic ie how the junior Jones would have known it when he lived there with his parents between the ages of 8 and 20 i.e. 1955–1967.
At the time Bowie – born David Robert Jones on 8 Jan 1947 at Brixton‘s Stansfield Road – moved to Bromley, the average UK house price rested at £1,884. In today’s parlance that translates to £44,795. Just imagine?
In June ’67 — the start of the so-called ’Summer Of Love’ and the month his self-titled debut album was issued — Bowie moved in to his manager Ken Pitt’s top floor flat at 39 Manchester Street in Marylebone, a West End girl for the first and indeed only time.
Coincidentally, 42-odd years later the residential lawfirm I used for the conveyancing of a Dulwich townhouse I happened to purchase (moving across-river to a suburban SE postcode from NW6, just around the corner from where that eponymous Deram LP had been recorded, yeah whatever) was Aubrey David Ltd at No.40, and our mainman Glen Bayliss was so excited when I told him the Dame had lived next door he exclaimed how the company must add it to their online bio immediately!
Why am I telling you this? Well, because come the following year, 2011, a small mid-terraced house in Bromley came on the market that July. The address was 4 Plaistow Grove, BR1 3PB, and to cut a very long story Kylie, I travelled with a friend (Becci, who had come to the capital to see Take That at Wembley, supported — somewhat reductively by Pet Shop Boys) and an ex (David) on the Southeastern train to Kent — a whole hour+ to Sundridge Park with a mad idea in my head.
The agents informed me that the retired couple who own the property would be in that afternoon and that they will conduct the viewing themselves, without the need for any agency rep to be there.
Number four Plaistow Grove was the compact rendered house that had been home to Bowie longer than any other in the UK, including his birthplace in Brixton.
My enterprising idea was to buy the house — a snip at not quite a quarter of a million — and turn it into a Bowie themed AirBNB type short term let experience. As I was already planning a monumental shift across the oceans to Australia I had no plans to live there myself but was rather hoping David might feel inspired to run the joint in a similar way to how he was managing the Dulwich den.
Needless to say, despite being a medium range Bowie fan he wasn’t terribly enthused, mindful of the work involved, particularly as the owners had done little to the property since they bought it from David’s mother Peggy in 1970. Plus the fact it was so far out the other two wondered if it would be a viable option money-wise. “Is it Kent or London? Either way, zone 4 is like the Outer Hebrides of the capital: you don’t go there unless you have to.”
They had a point, and while Bromley certainly boasts some huge seriously monied houses, Sundridge was about as upmarket as a pair of Pop Spex: “the crummy bit” of town, according to Bowie himself in a Sunday Times interview from 1975. Presumably that’s why, according to the sellers, Mrs Jones relayed how young master Davy would throw tantrums at alarming regularity, chucking his records out of his bedroom window into the back garden below. As Geoffrey Marsh, co-curator of 2013’s David Bowie Is exhibition at the V&A relays
“As he said, ’I spent so much time in my bedroom, it really was my entire world, I had books up there, my music up there, my record player, going from my world upstairs out on to the street, I had to pass through this no-man’s-land of the living room’.”
All was not lost, because the three of us decamped to another old haunt, enjoying a suitably retro-fashioned late lunch at the newly Bowie-themed Zizzi’s in nearby Beckenham (once an oversized local boozer called The Three Tuns which hosted his Beckenham Arts Lab ‘Growth’ events in 1969), while we talked terms, but it was not to be.
And so 15 years later my crazy idea is actually about to become a reality, because it’s just been revealed that the Heritage Of London Trust has purchased the house thanks to “a generous donation and plans to restore it to its 1960s appearance.”
According to their website, HOLT — who ‘boast’ the Duke of Gloucester as “our royal patron” and has numbered trustees including various prominent Tory crusties including Lord Ed Vaizey and property magnate Edward Benyon, son of my family’s local Milton Keynes MP Bill Benyon for 22 years — are a five-decade old charity that’s been “aiding the conservation and restoration of buildings of architectural and historic merit” by working with authorities, bodies, and, crucially, “grant and loan giving agencies to restore, repair and refurbish buildings at risk to bring them back into beneficial use.”
HOLT describe the acquisition is to be converted into “a living, creative space, part museum, part performance, part memory” that will be utilised “for creative and skills workshops for young people.” The purchase price has not been made public, though, curiously, a similarly sized house in Bickley’s Canon Road that the Joneses briefly lived in just before Plaistow Grove fetched a cool £449,500 in March 2025, and it appears the sellers of the future shrine were the same couple we visited in 2011. Indeed, they had warned us “we’re in no hurry to sell”. Finally and optimistically, HOLT adds that
“Bowie’s House aims to open to the public by the end of 2027. It will be a site of inspiration, a place to learn, explore or simply stand in the room where a spark became a flame.”
Though it’s welcome and intriguing news, I do wonder how much scope and room there will be for visitors considering the not quite two-up two-down is currently a modest 74 sqm and that’s with a downstairs extension that the powers that be have indicated will be demolished to return the house to its post-war decor.
Oh, by jingo, they’ve got a donation page up already, right here. Roll up, roll up.
Steve Pafford
