Bonnington Square

When I was finishing art school, just before I opened the first shop, my best friend Frank Taylor told me he and some friends were squatting in a house in Vauxhall’s Bonnington Square. It was a small square of empty Victorian properties that were more or less derelict. The minute I visited, I fell in love with the square. It was like something out of a Hitchcock movie or Ealing comedy – very run down, with no trees or plants, yet buzzing with musicians, writers, anarchists, hippies and painters. At Frank’s suggestion I moved in, without a moment’s hesitation. The house was extremely basic: one bathroom had the only hot water tank and we’d carry buckets of hot water down to the kitchen to wash up. I dressed the part of the respectable young lady and left the house early in the morning to meet suppliers, in an effort to show that I was trustworthy and, more to the point, creditworthy, then headed to the shop. It was a Jekyll and Hyde existence. My shop neighbours thought I was very posh – some boys from a nearby shoe shop, Robot, convinced themselves that I was the daughter of a lord, and others swallowed my story that I had had an affair with one of Thatcher’s naughty-boy ministers and the shop was my pay-off – they fell for it hook, line and sinker. It was a time of huge change; the era of punk, when computers were just becoming affordable to the masses, and life was notching up several gears. I met many brilliant and talented people, many of whom have remained good friends: Scott Crolla and Georgina Godley, who had a chic and anarchic clothes shop called Crolla in Dover St; Sebastian Conran and his siblings Jasper, Tom, Sophie and Ned; a slighter older, more sophisticated crowd included Doug Hamilton (visionary creative director behind Orange Hutchinson, among others) and Brian Boylan (now Chairman of Wolff Olins) and the bohemian Chelsea arty set of Paul Kasmin, Danny Moynihan and Bill Amberg. All these people seamlessly merged into the London scene in which I belonged.