Rooms Whose Names Didn't Change Even Slightly #13
The philosopher and novelist Colin Wilson was unknown, and famously sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath, when he wrote the book that made his name, The Outsider, in the mid-1950s. Later he was able to afford a small room in Chepstow Villas in Notting Hill, now pretty much a palace but then a run-down boarding house, and his bedsit was separated from another, at right angles to it, only by a flimsy partition. He discovered that pre-partition this was where Lynne Reid Banks had lived, and was the setting for her novel The L-Shaped Room.
Bryan Forbes' 1962 film of The L-Shaped Room is notable for featuring two British icons, not counting his wife Nanette Newman who appears for about two seconds at the end, as the new tenant of the room. The clip that precedes The Smiths' song The Queen Is Dead is from the film; and one of the prostitutes who lives in the basement is played by Pat Phoenix, already well known as Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street.
(In later years that could never have happened. Soap stars soon started to have exclusive contracts. For a long time they never used to be interviewed, never mind appear in anything else. Back in the days when plotlines were top secret instead of widely previewed, you always knew if someone was about to leave Corrie because they'd appear on talk shows, once they'd filmed their last scenes.)