HUNTER DAVIES: How Sir Keir, Lady Vic and Benedict Cumberbatch turned my shabby neighbourhood into a home fit for the Left's elite

I moved into London's Kentish Town 62 years ago, feeling that we were slumming, coming downmarket from a lovely little flat right in the middle of Hampstead Heath. KT did seem rather scruffy, decaying and shabby, compared with the bijou Georgian gems in Hampstead.

Last week, I walked down Kentish Town Road and found the bloody Tube station is still closed. Oh, God.

It's been shut for more than a year, with Transport for London saying the escalators are 'the poorest performing on the Tube network', and adding 'we're having trouble finding spare parts for the existing escalators, which are 26 years old and now obsolete...'

Sounds a bit like the poor old Tories, now departed.

But hold on. Local lad Sir Keir Starmer is now in charge, with another local lad Ed Miliband in his Cabinet. So, obviously, things will soon vastly improve, har har.

That is probably the biggest change since my wife [novelist Margaret Forster] and I bought our house in 1962 – the arrival of the elite. 

Nobody we knew lived in Kentish Town. But now, the place is heaving with top politicians, lawyers, accountants, writers, actors and publishers. 

You meet them in the pubs and Poundstretcher, or side by side, splashing away in Kentish Town swimming baths, or playing football, like Keir.

I began a local footer team in the 1980s, Dartmouth Park United, and we played each Sunday on the Heath. Rubbish level, scruffy local dads. 

I have a photo of them from 1980. Later, two went on to become life peers – Bernard Donoughue [head of Harold Wilson's policy unit] and Melvyn Bragg.

I like to think it was me and my wife settling here – sending our kids to the local primary school (where I became chairman of the governors) and joining action groups to bring in comprehensives – which helped make the area so desirable. 

Now we are smarter than the Primrose Hill Set, the Notting Hill Gang, and definitely more on-trend than the mouldy old Cotswolds crowd.

In 1962, the houses around us were multi-occupied, with sitting tenants. We had an Irish widow on the top floor, a controlled tenant, which we approved of, paying us 15 shillings a week. 

But when we had three children, and our tenant had more space than us, we bought her out.

Along the road were Irish labourers, carpet fitters and retired railway workers. Many of the previous generation had worked at King's Cross and St Pancras stations.

Now the sitting tenants have gone, either died off or paid off.

A barrister moved in opposite with his family, and became a judge. It is now all families – awfully successful families, in proper professional jobs, well-spoken, well-educated, intellectual sorts, but well Labour, of course.

There are two King's Counsellors, two partners in top accountancy firms, three well-known publishers, professors and life peers. Ed Miliband is in the next street with his wife Justine Thornton, who's both a Dame and a judge. 

Opposite them lives Benedict Cumberbatch. His children's nanny used to be my lodger on the top floor. Two streets away is the writer Julian Barnes.

Dear Keir and his wife Lady Starmer are further down the High Road, poor loves, slumming it, looking enviously up to us nobs right beside the Heath. 

The biggest attraction is the Heath, 800 acres of rural paradise, full of lakes, well ponds, and fells (in truth, gentle slopes). I can walk three hours and cross only one road and tell myself I am in Loweswater.

There are four swimming places – the Men's Pond, Ladies', Mixed and the Lido. Filled in the morning with professors and doctors splashing about. Plus Alastair Campbell.

Whenever a new legal or political whizz moves in, I tell them I am the street's longest-established resident and ask if they want to know how much I paid for my house. 

They say: 'Please, no.' I tell them all the same – just to see their shock. The answer is £5,000. They have paid £4 million.

Being on trend is never cheap…

• Hunter Davies' next book, Letters To Margaret, is published next month by Head of Zeus, priced £20.