The novelist – whose real name was Eric Blair – is commemorated with a blue plaque at 50 Lawford Road where he lived from August 1935 until January 1936.
He shared the top floor flat with friends and fellow writers Michael Sayers and Rayner Heppenstall and while living there wrote most of his 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
George Orwell was 32 when he lived in Kentish Town and just two years into his writing career. (Image: PA) The story follows his alter ego Gordon Comstock, who wants to live among “the lost people, the under-ground people, tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes”.
Lawford Road features in the book as Willowbed Road, a street that “contrived to keep up a kind of mingy, lower-middle-class decency”.
Orwell’s room was “a top floor back” that contained his writing table and on the window-sill a “sickly aspidistra in a green-glazed pot”.
Orwell’s life at that time was a succession of short-term lets around North London.
There’s a plaque to mark the spot next to what is now a Gail’s bakery, but 90 years ago it was Booklover’s Corner, which he wrote about in his essay Bookshop Memories.
It paints a picture of oddball customers, a “decayed person smelling of old breadcrumbs,” and a “dear old lady” who can’t remember the title, author or subject of the book she wants.
He notes drily that bookshops, are “one of the few places where you can hang around for a long time without spending any money”.
In 1935 Orwell also lived for six months at 77, Parliament Hill and it was at a party there that he met his future wife Eileen.
At the time he was 32 and just two years into his writing career – after publishing Down and Out in Paris and London in 1932.
The book recounts his time spent “tramping” around London and Kent in the late 1920s and his poverty-stricken spell in Paris.
During his explorations of the London underworld he slept in common lodging-houses (‘kips’) and the casual wards of workhouses (‘spikes’), and was even thrown into jail for a night.
Orwell left London altogether in 1936 at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He joined the Republican forces, became a dedicated socialist, and famously wrote about his experiences in Homage to Catalonia.
It wasn’t until one of his best-known works, Animal Farm, was published in 1945 that he achieved fame.
It was followed in 1949 by his most enduring novel Nineteen Eighty-Four which has been adapted into numerous radio, stage and screen adaptations.
George Orwell died in 1950 of tuberculosis and is buried in Oxfordshire.
