Last night I went – I did not dream, I went – to Little Green Street again. This address may not have the cachet of Du Maurier’s Manderley, but you can fall in love with an urban terraced house as easily as with a mansion in Cornwall.

I first saw Little Green Street thanks to John Betjeman. I was driving him back to Chelsea after visiting his childhood house on Highgate West Hill, for a series called Where I Was Young. He made me stop at the foot of the hill (as in his poem Summoned By Bells: “At that hill’s foot did London then begin”). He wanted to show me “the true Georgian of Kentish Town”. So I first saw the tiny hidden cobbled lane off the Highgate Road.

Little Green Street is like a stage set, one of London’s few remaining cobbled Georgian terraces: seven houses on one side, two on the other, most with storybook bow-fronted windows. They were originally shops. “Who do you think lives here nowadays?” said Sir John, feigning terror. “Villains, I expect.”

Two years later, newly married with dog and cat and expecting a first baby, we saw that No 8 Little Green Street was for sale: the flat-fronted, three-storey corner house, a latterday 1795 addition, six rooms, with wooden panelling and shutters. Grade II listed, and mentioned in Pevsner.

I rang Betjeman and told him that I’d bought a house there. “Oh good,” he said. “They were terrible slums in my day.” We left, six years later, only for the sake of space, since soon there would be seven of us. But I never felt the same about a house, before or since. My notebook reads like Mr Pooter’s account of moving in to “The Laurels”, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway. Having gone to the Booker dinner at Claridge’s on our first evening there, I wrote “but would much rather have been at home”. (As Mr Pooter said: “After my work in the City, I like to be at home. What is the good of a home, if you are never in it? ‘Home, sweet home,’ that’s my motto.”) The garden, abutting the railway line (£10 a year rent to British Rail), was a little green gem too; it had won prizes under its previous owner, Lucy Gent.

A quarter of a century later the cobbles, bow windows and lantern streetlights are unchanged. People stop and photograph it all the time. The present residents (a journalist, an actress, an architect, two students etc) are much as we were: in ten households just 20 adults and seven children. But they live under the shadow of a preposterous decision by Camden Council. The disused site at the end of the road, a former British Rail social club, was bought six years ago at auction for £1 million by Euro Investments. Camden rejected its scheme to build a gated community of 20 three-storey houses and ten flats plus underground parking for 17 cars, but in 2005 John Prescott’s office overruled the objection and planning permission was granted, subject to various conditions – including satisfactory construction plans.

These construction plans involve making the cobbled lane (2.3m wide – too narrow even to be a private driveway; taxis are reluctant to venture in, and garbage trucks won’t attempt it) the access route for 40-tonne lorries, cranes and diggers. Imagine these behemoths inching past the Toy-town windows, even if they overlaid the cobbles with tarmac to take the weight.

Last summer a notice appeared saying the road would be closed for the digging of “trial holes”. These revealed that the houses have no foundations. But the scheme is absurd anyway. It is not even a very lovely site – a square of wasteland sandwiched between housing estates, approached via a sinister alleyway under the railway. The Victorian church on the corner is being demolished to provide yet more flats. (The Kinks filmed a promo there in 1966 – dressed as Victorian undertakers, carrying a coffin down the alley and knocking on the door of No 4 – for their single Dead End Street.)

You can read all about it and see photographs on littlegreenstreet.com. Two thousand wellwishers have signed the petition and posted comments (eg, “I would be quite prepared to lie down in the path of the first construction vehicle that attempts to alter it”). And one resident, Peter Thomas, told me: “In one way it’s the best thing that could happen to this street. An amorphous bunch of people has become close and cohesive, united in the cause.”

There is a touch of the Nimby in all of us. And the upside of such misconceived plans is that they bring communities together. We measure out our lives in public meetings, protecting our already congested neighbourhoods against overdevelopment – “luxury flats” sprouting in any neglected corner like our townhall car park. We have a rus-in-urbe, wildlife-friendly walkway along an old railway track. So they plan to pave part, easing access for hooligans on stolen motorbikes. I’m always struck, at these meetings, by how many articulate neighbours emerge to air their expertise and oratory. At the railwayline meeting, the first speaker’s voice carried to the rafters: “Why is it that wherever there is a good, popular local amenity, used and loved by everyone, Haringey Council will try to destroy it?” She turned out to be Pat Arrow-smith, the veteran CND campaigner and heroine of direct action from the 1960s, who went to prison 11 times.

In Little Green Street, residents enjoy support from local luminaries, including Bill Nighy, Tom Conti and their MP, Frank Dobson. Tomorrow Camden Council will consider the application to landscape the project. Campaigners hope that the protection zone around Little Green Street’s giant plane tree might scupper this. I gladly add my voice. Save my old street from this madness!

Summer of Love and a snake-oil salesman

You’re not supposed to remember the Summer of Love if you were there. But I have an aide-mémoire, since I had a vacation job with the Evening Standard diary that summer.

Forty years ago tomorrow, on August 24, 1967, I was sent in my Biba flower-power mini-culottes and Indian beads to the Hilton Hotel, to hear someone called the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. “A little man,” said my story, “with long hair, grey beard and beatific smile.”

He sat in white robes, crosslegged on a deerskin, fondling a red rose. I asked him why, since he pursued an ascetic life, was he staying at the Hilton, a temple of Mammon? He smiled beatifically and said that it was comfortable. He struck me as an ace snake-oil salesman.

That night he gave a public lecture in the same venue. To my astonishment, who should arrive at the last minute to take the front-row seats but John and Cynthia Lennon, Paul McCartney and Jane Asher, George Harrison and wife Pattie, who, I noted, sat spellbound as he waffled on about spiritual regeneration and transcendental meditation. The next day John and George would follow their new guru to Bangor in North Wales. They were there three days later on the August Bank Holiday weekend when Brian Epstein was found dead.

The widow’s might

Frances Lawrence’s eloquent plea on behalf of her family’s rights reminded me of her words when she launched her awards for young people. People kept asking her if she forgave her husband’s killer. She said she wasn’t sure that forgiveness was in the scheme of things for her and her children’s shattered lives.

“I’m not saying ‘rot in hell’,” she told me. “I hope the killer too will make something of his life. But I feel that it’s somehow almost society’s need to ease its collective conscience, to give itself some comfort, some control and to simplify life – a sort of laziness, to want to think ‘Oh well, she forgives him, so that’s all right’.”

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