Famous people who grew up or lived in and around London

Ada Lovelace1815–1852

📍 12 St James's Square, London SW1Y 4RB, United Kingdom

I grew up at Ockham Park in Surrey, in a household that prized logic above all else — a deliberate choice by my mother to steer me away from my father's poetic temperament. She feared I had…

Adele1988–2006

📍 Tottenham, London N17, UK

Adele Laurie Blue Adkins was born in Tottenham, north London, in May 1988. Her mother, Penny, was just eighteen, and her father left when Adele was very small, so she was raised by her…

Alan Turing1912–1926

📍 2 Warrington Crescent, Maida Vale, London W9 1ER, United Kingdom

I was born Alan Mathison Turing on the 23rd of June 1912 in Maida Vale, London, in a comfortable terraced house in a neighbourhood of Victorian mansion blocks, and my early childhood was…

Alfred Hitchcock1899–1925

📍 517 High Road, Leytonstone, London E11 4PB, England

I was born on the 13th of August 1899 above my father's grocery shop in Leytonstone, then a quiet suburb at the northeastern edge of London. Leytonstone was respectable lower-middle-class …

Alicia Markova1910–1914

📍 Finsbury Park, London N4, UK

I was born Lilian Alicia Marks in December 1910 in Finsbury Park, north London, the eldest of four daughters of Arthur Marks, who was Jewish, and Eileen, an Irish Catholic who had converted…

Amy Winehouse2005–2011

📍 30 Camden Square, London NW1 9XA, England

I moved to Camden Square in north London in 2005, into a terraced house that I filled with music and friends and the particular chaos of a life lived entirely at full volume. Camden was my…

Anna Pavlova1912–1931

📍 Ivy House, North End Road, London NW11 7SX, UK

In 1912, with my partner and manager, Victor Dandré, I bought Ivy House, an elegant Georgian house on North End Road, on the edge of Hampstead Heath in north London. It had a huge old…

Barry Humphries1959–2023

📍 Little Venice, Maida Vale, London W9, United Kingdom

London became my second home — and, in time, my first. I settled near Little Venice, among the canals and stucco terraces of Maida Vale, a world away from Camberwell's clipped lawns yet…

Benedict Cumberbatch1976–1994

📍 Kensington, London W8, UK

Benedict Cumberbatch was born in 1976 and grew up in Kensington and Chelsea in west London, the only child of two actors, Timothy Carlton and Wanda Ventham. His half-sister, Tracy, was much…

Bobby Moore1941–1962

📍 43 Waverley Gardens, Barking IG11, UK

I was born at Barking Hospital in April 1941, during the Blitz, and grew up at 43 Waverley Gardens, a neat terraced council house in Barking, on the eastern edge of London, the only child…

Charles Darwin1842–1882

📍 Down House, Luxted Road, Downe, Bromley, Kent BR6 7JT, United Kingdom

I moved to Down House in the village of Downe in Kent in 1842, when I was thirty-three years old, and I lived there for the remaining forty years of my life. I chose Down House deliberately…

Charles Dickens1837–1839

📍 48 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LX, UK

I signed a three-year lease on 48 Doughty Street in March 1837, at eighty pounds a year — a respectable Georgian terrace in Bloomsbury, behind gates kept by a porter. For a man who had once…

Charlie Chaplin1889–1910

📍 287 Kennington Road, London SE11 6BY, England

I was born on the 16th of April 1889 in Walworth, South London, and grew up in the working-class streets of Kennington and Lambeth in conditions of genuine poverty. My mother Hannah was a…

Christopher Nolan1970–1988

📍 Highgate, London N6, UK

Christopher Nolan was born in Westminster, London, in July 1970 and grew up in Highgate, a leafy, hilly corner of north London with old houses, Highgate Wood, the famous cemetery and views…

Clement Attlee1883–1901

📍 Putney, London SW15, UK

I was born in January 1883 at our family home in Putney, then a leafy, prosperous suburb on the Thames, the seventh of eight children of Henry Attlee, a City solicitor, and his wife Ellen…

Daniel Radcliffe1989–2007

📍 Fulham, London SW6, UK

Daniel Radcliffe was born in 1989 and grew up in Fulham, west London, the only child of Alan Radcliffe, a literary agent from a Northern Irish family, and Marcia Gresham, a casting agent…

Darcey Bussell1969–1987

📍 Lambeth, London, UK

Darcey Bussell was born Marnie Mercedes Darcey Pemberton Crittle in London in April 1969, the daughter of John Crittle, an Australian fashion designer, and Andrea Williams, an English model…

David Beckham1975–1991

📍 Chingford, London E4, UK

David Beckham was born in Leytonstone, east London, in May 1975, the son of Ted, a kitchen fitter, and Sandra, a hairdresser, and he grew up in Chingford, a suburb on the edge of Epping…

David Bowie1969–1973

📍 Haddon Hall, Foxgrove Road, Beckenham, London BR3 5AT, England

Haddon Hall was a Victorian gothic mansion in Beckenham, south London, and it was there that I became David Bowie. I moved in with Angie in 1969 and the house became a salon, a rehearsal…

Diana, Princess of Wales1981–1997

📍 Kensington Palace, Kensington Gardens, London W8 4PX, United Kingdom

My apartment at Kensington was never quite what I'd imagined a royal home would be, but there was warmth in it when the boys were small and the formality dropped away. I chose this palace…

Elizabeth Taylor1932–1939

📍 8 Wildwood Road, Hampstead Garden Suburb, London NW11 6UL, UK

I was born in February 1932 at Heathwood, our family's home at 8 Wildwood Road in Hampstead Garden Suburb, a leafy, carefully planned corner of north London on the edge of Hampstead Heath…

Elton John1947–1967

📍 Pinner, London HA5, UK

Reginald Dwight was born in 1947 at 55 Pinner Hill Road, his grandparents' council house in Pinner, a quiet suburb at the edge of north-west London, and lived there for his first six years…

Fred Perry1918–1929

📍 Ealing, London W5, UK

I was born in Stockport, Cheshire, in May 1909, the son of Samuel Perry, a cotton spinner who had left school at ten, and my mother, Hannah. My father was active in the co-operative…

Freddie Mercury1980–1991

📍 Garden Lodge, 1 Logan Place, London, UK

Garden Lodge was my sanctuary — a beautiful Victorian house behind high walls in Logan Place, Kensington, that I spent years renovating and decorating until every room expressed exactly who…

George Michael1963–1975

📍 Kingsbury, London NW9, UK

I was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou in East Finchley, the youngest of three and the only son of a Greek Cypriot father, Jack, who had come to London in the fifties with nothing and…

Harry Kane1993–2009

📍 Chingford, London E4, UK

Harry Kane was born in Walthamstow, east London, in July 1993, and as a small boy moved with his parents, Pat and Kim, and his older brother, Charlie, to Chingford, a leafy suburb on the…

Hugh Grant1960–1978

📍 Chiswick, London W4, UK

Hugh Grant was born in 1960 and grew up in Chiswick, west London, where the family lived in a flat beside Arlington Park Mansions on Sutton Lane. His father, James Grant, was a former army…

J.M.W. Turner1775–1851

📍 21 Maiden Lane, London WC2E 7NA, England

I was born Joseph Mallord William Turner on the 23rd of April 1775 in Covent Garden, London, the son of a barber. The Covent Garden of the 1770s was a working neighbourhood of market…

Jimi Hendrix1968–1969

📍 23 Brook Street, Mayfair, London, UK

I lived at 23 Brook Street in Mayfair for a year between 1968 and 1969, in a flat above the one where George Frideric Handel had lived two hundred years before. I didn't know about Handel…

Jony Ive1967–1992

📍 Chingford, London, United Kingdom

Jonathan Paul Ive was born in Chingford, on the edge of Epping Forest in north-east London, in February 1967. His father, Mike Ive, was a silversmith who taught design and technology and…

Joseph Lister1827–1844

📍 Upton, West Ham, London E7, UK

I was born in April 1827 at Upton House, a large Georgian house set in about seventy acres of grounds at Upton, near West Ham, then a quiet village east of London. I was the fourth of seven…

Kate Bush1958–1978

📍 Welling, London Borough of Bexley, UK

Kate Bush was born in July 1958 and grew up at East Wickham Farm, an old farmhouse, more than three centuries old, near Welling in the London Borough of Bexley, on the very edge of suburbia…

King Charles III1948–1970

📍 Buckingham Palace, London SW1A 1AA, UK

Charles was born at Buckingham Palace in November 1948, and after a few years at Clarence House he grew up in its nursery wing once his mother became queen. With his parents often away on…

King George III1781–1818

📍 Kew Palace, Royal Botanic Gardens, Richmond TW9 3AE, UK

I preferred a quiet family life to the glitter of court, and Kew was where we lived it. In 1781 I bought the old red-brick Dutch House beside the gardens, built by a merchant in 1631, to…

Lydia Lopokova1925–1946

📍 46 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD, UK

In August 1925 I married John Maynard Keynes, the economist, and came to live with him at 46 Gordon Square, a tall terraced house on a leafy square in Bloomsbury, in the heart of London. I…

Margaret Thatcher1979–1990

📍 10 Downing Street, Westminster, London, United Kingdom

I moved into Number Ten in May 1979 as the first woman to hold this office in British history, and I was determined that neither I nor anyone around me would treat that fact as the point…

Margot Fonteyn1923–1927

📍 Ealing, London W5, UK

I was born Margaret Evelyn Hookham in Reigate, Surrey, in May 1919, and my family called me Peggy. My father, Felix, was an engineer with the British-American Tobacco Company, and my…

Michael Caine1933–1950

📍 Elephant and Castle, Southwark, London SE1, UK

Michael Caine was born Maurice Micklewhite in March 1933 at St Thomas' Hospital in London, and grew up in Southwark, south of the river, in a working-class family. His father, also Maurice…

Michael Faraday1813–1862

📍 Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BS, UK

I was a blacksmith's son from south London, apprenticed to a bookbinder, and I taught myself science from the books I bound. In 1812 a customer gave me tickets to hear Sir Humphry Davy…

Mo Farah1992–2001

📍 Isleworth, London Borough of Hounslow, UK

Mo Farah was born in Somaliland in 1983, and in 2022 he revealed in a BBC documentary the truth about how he came to Britain: at about the age of nine, after his father had been killed in…

Phil Collins1951–1970

📍 Hounslow, London TW3, UK

Phil Collins was born in Chiswick, west London, in January 1951 and grew up in Hounslow, a busy suburb under the flight path to Heathrow, in a family home on Hanworth Road. He was the…

Prince Harry1984–1997

📍 Kensington Palace, Kensington Gardens, London W8 4PX, UK

Harry grew up in Apartments 8 and 9 at Kensington Palace, the joined flats where his mother made the whole top floor into a nursery for him and his older brother William. In his memoir…

Prince William1982–1997

📍 Kensington Palace, Kensington Gardens, London W8 4PX, UK

William spent his childhood in Apartments 8 and 9 at Kensington Palace, the joined flats his parents moved into after their wedding, where his mother turned the whole top floor into a…

Princess Margaret1963–2002

📍 Apartment 1A, Kensington Palace, London W8 4PX, UK

I grew up at 145 Piccadilly and Royal Lodge, the adored younger sister who could make Papa laugh, and later shared those wartime Christmases at Windsor with Lilibet, starring in our…

Rod Stewart1945–1963

📍 Archway Road, Highgate, London N6, UK

Rod Stewart was born at 507 Archway Road in Highgate, north London, in 1945, the youngest of five children, and much younger than his brothers and sisters. His father, Robert, was a…

Roger Bannister1929–1939

📍 Harrow, London HA1, UK

I was born in Harrow, on the north-west edge of London, in March 1929. My father, Ralph, was a civil servant, the youngest of eleven children from a poor cotton-weaving family in…

Rosalind Franklin1920–1929

📍 50 Chepstow Villas, Notting Hill, London W11 2QZ, England

I grew up in Notting Hill in London, in a Jewish family with a strong intellectual tradition — my father Ellis Franklin was a barrister and my mother Muriel were both deeply committed to…

Sigmund Freud1938–1939

📍 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX, United Kingdom

After the Anschluss in March 1938, the Gestapo interrogated my daughter Anna for a full day. That was when I understood that we had to leave Vienna — the city where I had practised for…

Steve Harris1956–1975

📍 Leytonstone, London E11, UK

Stephen Percy Harris was born in Leytonstone, in east London, then part of Essex, in March 1956, and grew up there with his three sisters. His father worked away for long periods as a lorry…

Stormzy1993–2011

📍 Thornton Heath, Croydon, London CR7, UK

Michael Ebenazer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Jr. was born in July 1993 in Thornton Heath, a suburb of Croydon in south London, and grew up in nearby South Norwood with his Ghanaian mother, his…

Sylvia Plath1960–1961

📍 3 Chalcot Square, Primrose Hill, London NW1 8YB, UK

I grew up by the sea in Winthrop, Massachusetts, and then in Wellesley, a brilliant, driven girl who published her first poem at eight. After Smith College I won a Fulbright scholarship to…

Tim Berners-Lee1955–1973

📍 East Sheen, London SW14, UK

Tim Berners-Lee was born in London in June 1955 and grew up in East Sheen, a leafy suburb of south-west London near Richmond Park. His parents, Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods, were…

Tony Blair1997–2007

📍 10 Downing Street, Westminster, London, United Kingdom

Tony Blair lived at Downing Street from May 1997, when Labour won a landslide general election victory, until June 2007. He, his wife, Cherie, and their children lived in the larger flat…

Virginia Woolf1904–1907

📍 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London WC1H 0PD, UK

I grew up at 22 Hyde Park Gate in Kensington, a tall, dark house crammed with Victorian furniture, gaslight and grief — my mother died when I was thirteen, and my half-sister Stella soon…

William Morris1860–1865

📍 Red House, Red House Lane, Bexleyheath DA6 8JF, UK

I grew up at Woodford Hall on the edge of Epping Forest, riding through the forest in a toy suit of armour, reading medieval romances and exploring old churches. At Oxford I met Edward…

Winston Churchill1940–1955

📍 10 Downing Street, Westminster, London, United Kingdom

I served as Prime Minister at Number Ten twice — first from 1940, when the war demanded it, and again from 1951. During the war years I spent as much time as possible in the Cabinet War…