Charlie Chaplin's childhood home for sale
Monday, 5 September 2011 10:45 AM
Charlie Chaplin's childhood home has gone on the market for £650,000.
The actor and director lived at 39 Methley Street, in the South-East London area of Kennington, from 1898 to 1899, and the two-bedroom property is said to have inspired The Kid.
There is a blue plaque commemorating Chaplin's residency adorning the front exterior wall, and the property also features on the Charlie Chaplin walking tour. The Methley Street house has three floors, double reception, dining room and bespoke kitchen.
Hannah, Chaplin's singer-actress mother, spent much of her life in the Cane Hill Asylum, and the Methley Street property is where she lived with Charlie and his brother during one of her brief periods of freedom.
Prior to that, the boys had been living with Charles Chaplin Senior – an alcoholic – and his mistress Louise at 287 Kennington Road.
Though very pleasant now, the Kennington road was far from salubrious when Charlie Chaplin lived there: in fact, he resided next door to a slaughterhouse, and farm animals were constantly herded down the street and into the abattoir.
In his autobiography, Chaplin recounts an episode when a lamb escaped and ran amok, which greatly tickled him until it was caught – at which point he ran to his mother, screaming in distress at the fate that awaited the creature.
And the incident affected his future far more deeply than he could have imagined at the time: Chaplin wrote, "I wonder if that episode did not establish the premise of my future films – the combination of the tragic and the comic."
Adjacent to the slaughterhouse was a pickle factory, though nowadays it has been converted into apartments and renamed City Lights Court in reference to Chaplin's 1939 film.
The brick-fronted mews house where Charlie Chaplin lived for one fateful year is now back on the market for the first time in a decade with an asking price of £650,000 freehold. For enquiries, call Kinleigh Folkard & Hayward's Kennington branch on 020 7582 7773.
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