Lemmons

Lemmons, also known as Gladsmuir and Gladsmuir House, was the home of the English novelists Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) and Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923–2014) on the south side of Hadley Common, Barnet, on the border of north London and Hertfordshire, England.

The couple bought the Georgian villa, built around 1830, for £48,000 at auction in 1968, along with its eight acres of land, and lived there until 1976. The house had been registered as a Grade  II listed building in 1949 under the name Gladsmuir, previously known as Gladsmuir House. Howard restored an earlier name, Lemmons; the next owners changed it back to Gladsmuir.

Howard and Amis lived at Lemmons with Howard's mother and brother, two artist friends, and Amis's three children, including the novelist Martin Amis. Several of the family's novels were written at Lemmons: Kingsley's The Green Man (1969) and The Alteration (1976); Howard's Odd Girl Out (1972) and Mr. Wrong (1975); and Martin's The Rachel Papers (1973) and Dead Babies (1975).

The poet Cecil Day-Lewis stayed at Lemmons in the spring of 1972, when he was dying of cancer, accompanied by his wife, Jill Balcon, and their children, Daniel Day-Lewis and Tamasin Day-Lewis. He wrote his last poem in the house, "At Lemmons", and died there shortly afterwards. Ian Sansom writes that, for the brief period that the Amises, Howards, Day-Lewises and others were in residence, Lemmons became "the most brilliantly creative household in Britain".

The land and an earlier house were owned by Henry Bellamy in 1584. The Quilter family owned the land from 1736 to 1909; it consisted of 23 acres in 1778. The present house was built around 1830. A Major Charles Hemery appears to have lived in the house in or around 1881.

The writer Frances Trollope, mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope, rented a house on Hadley Common from January 1836 until the early summer of 1838, possibly Gladsmuir, shortly after the death of her husband and one of her sons. According to Robert Bradford's biography of Martin Amis, Jane Howard discovered the Trollope connection from the house's papers and maintained that Frances Trollope had purchased it, although a purchase seems unlikely given the Trollope family's finances. Frances Trollope and four of her children moved to Hadley Common from Belgium, where they had fled to escape debtors' prison in England. When Trollope's husband (the debtor) died, the threat of prison receded. Her daughter Emily had tuberculosis, and her doctor advised that winter in England would benefit her.

Trollope described the property as "her pretty cottage" and a "pleasant house with a good garden on the common at Hadley, near Barnet". R. H. Super writes that Trollope invited eight guests to stay with her one Christmas, in addition to her family, so referring to it as a cottage was somewhat misleading. The move did not, in the end, help Emily, who died in February 1836. She was buried in the nearby churchyard at the Church of St Mary the Virgin. Anthony Trollope later placed one of his characters in The Bertrams (1859) in a dull country house in Hadley.

Jane Howard found that the house had previously been called Lemmons, and decided to restore that name. It was known as Gladsmuir when they bought it—from Gladsmuir Heath, the former name of Hadley Common, site of the Battle of Barnet in 1471 during the Wars of the Roses. The house had been registered under that name as a Grade II listed building in 1949, previously known as Gladsmuir House, with an address in Hadley Wood Road. As of 2014 the address was listed as Hadley Common.