📍Green Hedges, Penn Road, Beaconsfield HP9 2LW, UK
1938 – 1967“I grew up in Beckenham, south London, where my father taught me to love nature, music and books; he left the family when I was thirteen, and it broke my heart. I trained as a teacher, wrote for children's magazines and published my first books in the 1920s. In 1938 my family moved from Old Thatch, our cottage at Bourne End, to a mock-Tudor house on Penn Road in Beaconsfield, and I asked the readers of my magazine, Sunny Stories, to help name it. They chose Green Hedges, and it became my home for almost thirty years. Green Hedges had a large garden, with lawns, roses, a rockery, fruit trees and a pond, and I loved it. I wrote in the garden whenever I could, sitting in a chair with my typewriter on my knees, often producing thousands of words a day. My daughters, Gillian and Imogen, grew up there, and the house was filled with pets and letters from children all over the world. I married Kenneth Darrell Waters in 1943, and he too made Green Hedges his home. I held story parties for local children and raised money for children's charities. At Green Hedges I wrote nearly all of the Famous Five and Secret Seven books, the Adventure series, Malory Towers and the Noddy stories, hundreds of books in all. Children could even see the house in miniature, because a model of Green Hedges stood at Bekonscot Model Village in Beaconsfield. The house itself was demolished in 1973, but a blue plaque on the site and the model at Bekonscot keep alive the place where so many childhood adventures were written.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today