HERE’S a game I play on dull afternoons. Open an A-Z of London and imagine that the areas are characters in an Agatha Christie novel. There’s Brent Cross, the raffish American, Alexandra Palace, the heiress, and Colin Dale, the junior doctor. Russell Square sounds like a stammering librarian, Theydon Bois is a French tourist and Totteridge & Whetstone are either a firm of solicitors or bodysnatchers.

Not all areas resemble the way they sound (Dagenham Heathway sounds more like a moustache-twirling cad than an East London wasteland), but Primrose Hill, like her South London sister Lavender, definitely lives up to the Agatha Christie treatment. As you would expect, the area to the north of Regent’s Park is smart, rich, gracious and unassuming.

The “village” of Primrose Hill is made up of 27 largely residential streets, tucked between the railway to the east and the hill itself. Traffic calming and a lack of through roads have kept out the cars that clog up neighbouring Camden Town and St John’s Wood, and the most likely noise will be from small children.

Martin Amis, whose father, Kingsley, lived there, refers to “pramtorn Primrose Hill” in his novel Yellow Dog because the number of young families living there is spreading like a nasty bout of nappy rash. The peace of the wide tree-lined streets, where the dominant style is stuccoed Victorian houses with the odd block of postwar flats, is one attraction for families, as well as tobogganing down the 206ft hill itself or visiting London Zoo at the top of Regent’s Park.

In the days when men wore frilly ruffed shirts (no, not the early Eighties) the hill was the favoured location for love quarrels to be settled by duels at dawn. Today the only shooting that goes on is the snapping of camera lenses to fill the glossy magazines and tabloids.

“There’s a smattering of celebrities living here, although most new buyers are wealthy young City workers,” says Paul Ainscough-Brown, of Goldschmidt & Howland, “but Primrose Hill is definitely where they all hang out.”

The draw is not just bars and restaurants; Primrose Hill has also become a niche area for alternative medicine types who are Camden in spirit but not in clientele. Gwyneth Paltrow’s acupuncturist, for example, does his pin-sticking in a Primrose Hill surgery. Jude Law and Harry Enfield are the local luvvies, and neighbours include the writer A. N. Wilson and the broadcaster Joan Bakewell, still dubbed the thinking man’s crumpet even if she has been in the bread bin a while. Alan Bennett — the thinking woman’s macaroon — lives on the borders of Primrose Hill but is often spotted shopping there.

Primrose Hill has always attracted arty types. Blue plaques dotted around commemorate the likes of the Proms pioneer, Sir Henry Wood, or the poet W. B. Yeats, in whose former house on Fitzroy Road the poet Sylvia Plath lived for a few months before her death in 1963.

But house prices are now a bit too high for even the most successful of poets. Paul Ainscough-Brown says: “You’d be looking at £500,000 for a two-bedroom flat, £700,000 for a maisonette and well over a million for a two-storey house.” The most expensive place on the Goldschmidt & Howland books is a four-bedroom Georgian house on Chalcot Crescent for £1.8 million, but don’t expect it to dip in value over the next year. Mr Ainscough-Brown says:

“People in Primrose Hill don’t even know what the word recession means. They put their houses on the market at the highest possible price and wait until a buyer comes along.”

The place is also something of a breeding ground for new Labour. The Miliband brothers, Ed and David, the former a policy wonk, the latter now the Schools Minister, grew up there, while Derek Draper, the former spin doctor for Peter Mandelson, and a young lawyer named Blair also lived there for a while.

On the other side of politics, the amiable Stanley Johnson, father of Boris, that wonderfully eccentric cross between Bertie Wooster and an English sheepdog, lives in a pink house with a rocking horse in the window. Boris’s favourite mount these days, however, is his trusty bicycle.

Goldschmidt & Howland: 020-7289 6666

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