📍The Kilns, Lewis Close, Headington Quarry, Oxford OX3 8JD, UK
1930 – 1963“Warnie and I pooled our inheritance in 1930 to buy The Kilns, named after the old brick kilns on the land, at Headington Quarry on the edge of Oxford. It came with eight acres of woodland, a flooded clay pit for a pond, and a punt we took out on summer evenings. We shared it with Mrs Moore and her daughter Maureen — I had promised her son Paddy, before he was killed in the war, that I would look after his family, and I kept that promise for thirty years. In September 1939 the first evacuee children arrived from London, frightened girls who needed beds, books and stories. They were curious about everything, and I began to imagine four children sent away from London to a professor's house in the country. My boyhood in Belfast, where Warnie and I invented whole kingdoms in the attic, had given me the habit. The Kilns gave me the setting and the reason. I wrote the Narnia books here, married Joy late and happily here, and lived here for the rest of my life.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today