The Lady in the Van may be a great comic character, but she is one of the unlikelier Britons ever to earn a blue plaque in her honour. Yet one now adorns the façade of 23 Gloucester Crescent, the London address that she besieged for fifteen years. Alan Bennett – her landlord of sorts – published the original story in the London Review of Books in 1989. Nicholas Hytner (who directs the new film) directed a stage version with Maggie Smith in 1999, when she was in her mid-sixties. It's a wonder they didn't film it then. But time has only enhanced Smith's portrayal of this quotable eccentric. The film was actually shot at 23 Gloucester Crescent; Bennett still owns it, though he doesn't live there. Maggie Smith, in an interview, said of the filming: 'It was haunting, and I also felt a bit guilty.'

Bennett – a veteran of Beyond the Fringe – was already famous when Miss Shepherd steered her putrid van into Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town, and applied the brake with the force of Excalibur. Gloucester Crescent was home to fashionable writers, editors, bohemians, directors, musicians. (A century earlier Charles Dickens consigned his abandoned wife to the Crescent – Catherine Dickens, another outcast.)