Kathy Burke’s autobiography recalls the Islington streets, haunts and homes that have shaped her life

BEFORE Gimme Gimme Gimme and Absolutely Fabulous made her a household name, Kathy Burke was putting on lunchtime plays at St John Evangelist primary school and doing improv at the Anna Scher Theatre in Angel.

As a child, “Little Kathy Burke” played hide and seek in the estate off Upper Street where she lived with her father and brothers, bought second-hand clothes and sausages in Chapel Market on Sundays, and got lost in stories at Camden Passage’s Angel Bookshop and the Essex Road library.

“This whole area was and still is my stomping ground,” writes the actor, comedian and director in her new autobiography, A Mind of My Own, which vividly recalls the Islington streets, haunts, and homes that have shaped her life.

Kathy’s parents, Pat and Bridget, met at the Gresham Ballroom in Holloway Road, and were living between Upper Street and Essex Road in Halton Mansions when she was born in 1964. She lived there until she was a teenager.

“The blocks in Halton Mansions were all open in those days,” she writes. “You could whizz about the place and zoom in and out of the blocks. Brilliant for ‘knock down ginger’ and hide-and-seek.

“What wasn’t so brilliant was they were a hunting ground for ‘dirty old men’ or ‘flashers’. You’d often come across one lurking, ready to expose themselves to some unsuspecting kid. We’d just point and laugh at them until they shuffled off, humiliated.”

Kathy’s mother died when she was two and her father’s intermittent alcoholism meant she was taken care of by Irish neighbours, teachers, social workers and her brothers, leaving plenty of time to roam freely.

She hassled the antique shop keepers in Camden Passage on market days – putting on a posh accent to enquire about a “lamp for the nanny’s room”; acquired a short-lived white mouse, Dennis, from a pet shop on Essex Road; and wheeled up and down Balls Pond Road in a discarded buggy, pretending to be her friend Diane’s baby.

Like any memories of a London neighbourhood, some of Kathy’s favourite childhood haunts are no longer there, including the “Tibs”, a public pool in Tibberton Street, and the ABC Cinema on Essex Road that became a bingo hall and is now Gracepoint, a church and venue for hire.

At 12, she joined the Islington Boat Club and remembers “canoeing on the still waters at the Angel end of Regent’s Canal on peaceful Sunday afternoons. I loved the life jackets and hot chocolate afterwards. It was also where a boy tried to kiss me for the first time – but I declined through fear and disbelief.”

She added: “There was always so much to do. So much fun to be had. And I grabbed every opportunity to have it.”

In 1977, when she was just 13, punk rock “saved” her from puberty – which she hated – and it was within that scene that she had a particularly thrilling encounter outside the Hope and Anchor.

“I was too young to actually go in, but I wandered up and down outside to see if I could spot any cool cats – and one day I did.”

It was Johnny Rotten.

She caught his eye.

“‘Hello, little girl,’” he said.

“A million thoughts whizzed through my head. What to say? What to say? What to say?!

“‘F**k off, Johnny!’ came my reply, which earned big laughs from himself and the crowd.”

Kathy went to secondary school at Camden’s Maria Fidelis, where a kind teacher encouraged her to join the wait list for the Anna Scher Theatre – a “magical” place where she started training as an actor three years later. That changed the course of her life.

It was there that she got her first TV role as Glennis in Scrubbers, and from there began her journey from an unknown performer who made people laugh to an actor who, by her late 20s, was “being offered jobs without having to audition”.

Throughout that time, Kathy frequented the Old Red Lion in St John Street – one of London’s earliest fringe theatres – where she assistant directed her first play.

Even when she moved away from her father’s house, Kathy stayed close to home – first a flat in New North Road and then, in 1999, a house by Highbury Fields, where she still lives now.

She may be a household name, but Kathy Burke’s life in Islington is less well known, and is certainly worth reading in her own distinctive voice.

A Mind of My Own is told as snippets of memory that are funny and heartbreaking in turn, and so visceral that they make you feel like you might have lived it all too.

• A Mind of My Own by Kathy Burke, published by Gallery, is out now.