SFScope friend Andrew Porter reports that J.G. Ballard‘s home in Shepperton, UK, is for sale. This article in the Independent (which has this photo of Ballard in his home) says the asking price is just under £320,000. Reporter Rob Sharp describes the “rather drab semi-detached home” as “inextricably linked with the life of one of post-war fiction’s greatest talents. Many of the country’s best writers, often Ballard’s disciples, visited the author during the 49 years that he lived in this sleepy suburb, where he crafted the dystopian thrillers Crash and Cocaine Nights.”
Estate agent Haart shows two views of the unremarkable house “in need of refurbishment” in this listing. But it is clearly the house’s former occupant that makes the house noteworthy.
Sharp writes “Ballard’s former partner, Claire Walsh, has told friends the house is finally on the property market following the writer’s death in 2009.” The asking price “does not do justice to the life which played out behind its clipped privet hedge. Ballard moved to Old Charlton Road, Shepperton, in 1960, and wrote his first novel, The Wind From Nowhere, two years later, before becoming a full-time writer. His wife died in 1964, leaving him to raise his three children, James, Fay and Bea, on his own.”
Sharp also quotes Martin Amis of his visit to Ballard in 2009: “He told me that ‘Crash freaks’, from, say, the Sorbonne, would visit expecting to find a miasma of lysergic-acid and child abuse. In fact, what they found was a robustly rounded and amazingly cheerful suburbanite.” And writer Iain Sinclair described his own “pilgrimage” to the house, describing a “silver Ford Granada tilted at a drunken angle, like a sinking cabin-cruiser, in the vestigial driveway.”
Related articles previously published on SFScope:
J.G. Ballard’s literary archives ceded to the British Library (16 June 2010
Author J.G. Ballard Dies (19 April 2009)