House in Bayswater Road where J M Barrie wrote Peter Pan goes on market for £7m

The house where J M Barrie wrote Peter Pan has gone on the market for £6.95 million.

The Victorian semi in Bayswater Road is next to Kensington Gardens, which inspired the playwright when he wrote about the boy who never grew up, and where the famous statue of Peter Pan was erected in 1912.

The house was built in 1820 and first inhabited by a gardener before Barrie and his wife, Mary Ansell, moved in in 1900.

It was refurbished by Ansell, who knocked down walls to create two large reception rooms with painted panelling and added one of London’s first conservatories.

She reflected Barrie’s Scottish roots with a Glaswegian gas fireplace and the door handles are adorned with decorative thistles.

After the Barries divorced in 1909, the house was sold to sculptress Kathleen Bruce, the widow of Barrie’s friend and Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Scott.

She moved in with her second husband, the writer and Liberal politician Hilton Young and their two-year-old son, and the property has remained in the family since.

Historic: The blue plaque on the houseThe Youngs have been forced to sell the house — which is being marketed by Strutt & Parker — because of inheritance tax, according to The Sunday Times. While the building has remained untouched in over a century, the wallpaper and furniture appears to be from the Seventies.

Visitors are said to have included Lawrence of Arabia, James Mason, William Golding, John Betjeman, Lord Asquith and Nobel prizewinners.

“Malcolm Sargent would play the piano while Marie Rambert danced, and in the Sixties, Harold Wilson, Tony Benn and Anthony Crosland met here to chat,” said Louisa Young, author of a biography of her grandmother, A Great Task Of Happiness: The Life Of Kathleen Scott.

ES