Left: site of 15 Maitland Park Villas Belsize Park, home of George and Weedon Grossmith. Right: Bacton in Southampton Road, site where Jerome K Jerome’s home once stood

HAMPSTEAD is, of course, renowned for its literary connections. The combined royalties of Agatha Christie (Lawn Road), Ian Fleming (North End Avenue), John le Carré (Gainsborough Gardens) and Enid Blyton (Fellows Road) alone could finance a small country.

At first glance, though, there is one street that has not housed any literary lions at all – Fleet Road, off South End Green.

But in fact Fleet Road’s unique value lies in the fact that geographically it connects two extra-ordinary book pairings.

The north end of the road leads to Pond Street. By sheer coincidence the authors of the two most dystopian British novels ever written – Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World – both resided in houses at either end of the street.

Born in India, George Orwell was educated at Eton before spending a few years as a down-and-out in Paris and London. Then in 1934 he found employment at “Book­lovers’ Corner”, a shop at the corner of Warwick Mansions. Taking pity on his impoverished young employee, the bookshop proprietor allowed him accommodation above the premises.

Orwell was to go on to write Nineteen Eighty-Four, his nightmarish view of a society crushed under totalitarianism and mass surveillance.

In 1920, Aldous Huxley lived just off Pond Street at 18 Hampstead Hill Gardens, only 200 metres away from Orwell’s future abode. Also educated at Eton, Huxley became a teacher at the school until, finding himself incapable of keeping order in class, he turned to writing as a career.

His novels were successful, the most famous being his 1932 Brave New World, a vision of a grim future in which society is dominated by scientific engineering and the human spirit emasculated. (After experiencing mescaline in 1953, Huxley was inspired to write Island, a portrayal of a utopian future enhanced by mind-expanding drugs in contrast to the horrors of his most famous book.)

Left: Warwick Mansions, where George Orwell lived above a shop at the corner. Right: Aldous Huxley lived at 18 Hampstead Hill Gardens. Montages: Vanessa Heron

During their respective spells at Eton College, Huxley was Orwell’s French teacher.

The southern end of Fleet Road leads to Southampton Road. In another strange coincidence the authors of arguably the two greatest British comic novels – Three Men in a Boat and The Diary of a Nobody – lived within a stone’s throw of each other on either side of this thoroughfare.

Although both houses are now buried beneath the new estates built during the 1970s, before the erection of Bacton Low Rise this had been the home of the writer Jerome Klapka Jerome.

Originally from Walsall near Birmingham, Jerome came to London and found work as a journalist. In 1888, he married a girl named Georgina and for their honeymoon they decided that they would take a trip “on a little boat” up the River Thames. This holiday was to change his life as it gave him the idea for a novel.

For fictional purposes he replaced Georgina with two male friends, George and Harris, and added a dog named Montmorency. The resulting book, Three Men in a Boat, is a comic masterpiece that sold over one million copies in the following 20 years alone and has never been out of print. It emphasised the insouciant element of the English character: “It is not that I object to work, mind you; I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”

What is extraordinary is that the other unquestioned treasure of Victorian comic novels was written by a man who not only lived just 300 metres away (to the south-west as the crow flies) but also was published in the same year of 1888.

George Grossmith was resident at 15 Maitland Park Villas when, together with his brother Weedon, he began the series of Punch articles that were to emerge as The Diary of a Nobody. In it, they created a gloriously entertaining world of English suburban self-importance forever punctured by the pratfalls of reality. It added the adjective “pooterish” to the English dictionary and is said to have inspired the character of Captain Mainwaring in the TV comedy Dad’s Army.

Both Three Men in a Boat and The Diary of a Nobody have been endlessly staged, filmed, televised and adapted ever since their creation and remain as fresh and funny as they were in 1888.

So, although bereft of famous literati itself, Fleet Road can boast of being the stretch of tarmac that links the futuristic hells imagined on Pond Street to the glorious comedies that bestrode Southampton Road.

On a more macabre note, Fleet Road played host to the murderer Dr Crippen. He had a fare­well drink with his lover Ethel Le Neve in The Stag pub before departing on their unsuccessful escape bid across the Atlantic. Also, at one point John Christie, the perpetrator of the 10 Rillington Place murders, worked at the old tram depot on the site of the newly built Byron Mews just opposite the Royal Free Hospital Recreation Club.

• This observation is from Neil Titley’s latest book, Under Ken Wood – The Secret Life of a London Pub (£10). It is available from Daunt’s Bookshop in South End Green, as well as Keats Community Library or online from its website: www.keatscommunitylibrary.org.uk/ The profits from book sales will be donated to the library fund.