Peter Pan's home for sale

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Peter Pan's home for sale

It doesn’t mention it in the estate agent’s particulars, but if you gaze up at the top floor of No 31 Kensington Park Gardens, you might spot three pyjama-clad children and a mischievous young boy flying out of the nursery window.

For this is the home of the fictional Darling children, Wendy, John and Michael, made famous by J M Barrie in his evergreen masterpiece Peter Pan. Not only was he a frequent visitor to the house in south-west London, which featured in both the book and subsequent films, but he went on to adopt the five real-life children who once lived there. They were the Llewellyn Davies family, whom Barrie brought up after the deaths of their parents Arthur and Sylvia in the early 1900s.

Today, the house is divided into flats and the garden apartment is on the market for just under £1 million. Back towards the end of the 19th century, though, No 31 was still one single, large house, inhabited by the Llewelyn Davieses between 1897 and 1904. And it was on one of the children’s regular outings to nearby Kensington Gardens that they came across a most unusual sight.

A tiny man, just 4ft 10in tall, play-wrestling with a giant St Bernard dog that was standing on two legs. The one without the tail was the celebrated author J M Barrie, the one with the thick fur and wet snout was his treasured pet Porthos.

That day marked the start of a long association in which the childless Barrie took an ever more active part in the Llewelyn Davies’s life, providing them not just with financial help, but volunteering to raise the children himself after the deaths of their parents.

source: The Telegraph