Lemmons

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

The couple bought the Georgian house and its eight acres of land at auction for £48,000 in 1968, 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. Jane Howard restored its previous name, Lemmons; the next owners changed it back to Gladsmuir.

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

Cecil Day-Lewis, the poet laureate, his wife, Jill Balcon, and their children, Daniel Day-Lewis and Tamasin Day-Lewis, stayed at Lemmons in the spring of 1972, when Cecil was dying of cancer. 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."