Blue Plaque Tour #1 - The Huxleys of Hampstead

Go into any small French town and you are likely to walk along streets named after the country's writers - even relatively minor figures in the canon. In Britain it's hard even to find a Shakespeare Street or Dickens Road. London does make up for it some way though, with blue plaques affixed to the walls of the London house with which writers and other achievers were most associated.
I spent a merry Christmas Day in the house where J.M.Barrie wrote Peter Pan. Here though is the first in a sequence of houses in my new neighbourhood - the home where the three Huxley boys, Leonard, Julian and Aldous, grew up. It's at 16 Bracknell Gardens in Hampstead.
It was a thrill to find this on my daily walk. Julian became prominent for me as we became friends with his son Francis Huxley, the writer and anthropologist (a neighbour in Santa Fe, now moved to California).
Aldous has the most resonance though. He plays a significant part in my forthcoming J.S.Haldane biography, spending some years as part of the Haldane Oxford household and writing Haldane as the character Lord Tantamount in Point Counter Point. Beyond that, his Brave New World was the Ur-text for my own dystopian novel, Ectopia. My job of the next week is to bring that work into active play in my consciousness - Ectopia was written as part of a PhD thesis: the Viva for that takes place next week. My 2007 is starting with a distinctive dystopian twang.
May yours be distinctly more cheerful!