With the glint in her eye so familiar to viewers of her comedy hits, Meera Syal plays up the virtues of east London. “Welcome to Leytonstone, lovely Leytonstone,” she intones in the Indian vowels of her alter ego, Granny Kumar. “Where else could you get a six-bedroom house for only £470,000?” Thanks to the success of her novels and television shows, including The Kumars at Number 42, Goodness Gracious Me, and Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee — and also because of her recent marriage to Kumars co-star Sanjeev Bhaskar — Syal, 44 tomorrow, is selling up. She isn’t moving far: her new home is a larger, £1m-house in nearby South Woodford.
Leytonstone is not normally associated with glamorous actresses or the pages of celebrity magazines. “I’ve a bit of an anti-Hello! lifestyle,” laughs Syal, who nevertheless was a guest at the recent wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.
“This area of London is brilliant — it has the best of both worlds. It’s easy to get into town, being closer to the centre than Ealing, but it’s incredibly green and and has a wonderful community feel. I’ve grown to love the East End, its history, its people. It’s also a really multicultural area — I have to have access to Asian culture, and I’m very near Brick Lane and Green Street with all their restaurants and fashions and where some of my writing is set.”
The Edwardian semi, close to the greenery of Epping Forest, has been “a very happy home, full of friends, parties and girly chats,” she says.
It has also been something of a sanctuary for Syal, who bought the house for £230,000 in 1999 after her first marriage broke up, and moved in with her daughter, now 12.
“This was the home where I healed myself,” says the actress, who has lived in the area since 1990. “It’s where I recovered when I became a single mum. One of the main factors in buying it was that it is very near my ex-husband and I wanted my daughter to have instant access to him whenever she wanted.” The large house, which overlooks a wooded conservation area, was derelict when Syal bought it, having been in the hands of one family for 50 years.
“I did every little thing in it,” says the actress, who has kept the house’s period features including original plasterwork, tiled marble and iron fireplaces, and panelled doors.
“The builders were in for six months. I replaced the missing Edwardian tiles outside the front door and renovated the sash windows, I built a loft conversion to house the au pair. It was such a learning curve — nothing will ever be as difficult again. Now I know how to organise a damp-proof course, and how important it is to keep your gutters clean — I learnt it all on this house.”
Syal fell in love with the property as soon as she walked through the door. “A girlfriend came to see it and was horrified by how much work it needed. She kept saying: ‘Are you kidding?’ But all I could see was the view, the nooks and crannies. I love old buildings: I was brought up in a small mining village in the Midlands and I felt very at home here with streets of terraced houses. I believe in buying a house because it’s got the right feel.”
Indeed, Syal employed the services of a vaastu expert — the Indian equivalent of feng shui — to bring a bit of cosmic harmony to Leytonstone. He instructed her to tape small chunks of marble to the walls of the conservatory.
Again adopting her comic Indian accent, she recalls: “He said, ‘This is very bad, very bad. A sloping roof drains energy from a house’. He recommended these little bits of vaastu marble, each marked so you can tell which side faced the mountain when they were mined. They have a breathing, living energy.”
She laughs: “It must have worked, because it really has been a very, very happy house. He said it faced the right direction, was welcoming and good for my career, so that was a relief.” Creating the right sort of energy doesn’t come cheap: the vaastu man also recommended installing a grand slab of marble atop the kitchen units, at a cost of £3,000. In total, Syal spent £70,000 on the renovation.
Syal knocked two rooms together to form a huge kitchen/diner, the scene of much entertaining.
“It’s a great party room,” she says. “I’d cook my signature dish — aloo paratha, a sort of stuffed chapatti — and we’d all spill out into the garden later in the evening. Last year, I organised a rounders match on Wanstead Flats nearby, and we all came back for wine and pasta after. I was brought up with people in and out of the house all the time, often unannounced, and that’s what it has been like here. The neighbours are great, the kind who are there for you, but not in your face.”
Syal wrote many of her most famous works in the upstairs study, including Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee — recently adapted for a primetime BBC1 slot — and parts of the comedy Goodness Gracious Me. “Can you smell the sweat on the walls?” she jokes.
Above all, Forest Glade, as it is called, is a family house. In the hall, a deep Edwardian cupboard was Syal’s linen press: “It made me feel like a proper housewife looking at all my linen stacked up.” A playroom, flooded with light, occupies an upstairs room, and a series of cat flaps accommodated Fat Louis, the family pet. “I’ve photos of him taking his first steps in the garden. He found the move really traumatic.” At night, the sounds of owls echo from surrounding woodland.
At the end of last year, Syal and Bhaskar found their dream house — before they had put either of their previous properties on the market. “It wasn’t ideal, we’ve a very understanding bank,” she says. “We both work from home, so we needed more space.” They moved into the new home at the end of February.
“I had a couple of offers from people who wanted to carve this place up into flats,” she says. “I turned them down, which the estate agent wasn’t very happy with. I’m really sad to be leaving, and I know it sounds sentimental, but this house deserves to be a family home.”
Meera Syal’s house is on the market for £469,995 with Douglas Allen Spiro, 020 8530 3741, www.douglasallenspiro.co.uk
