Back in 1975, Sid Vicious’s mother, Anne Beverley, gently took her son aside and told him the time had come to fly the nest. “I said, it’s either you or me, and it’s not going to be me, so you can just f***off,” Beverley is quoted as saying in Alan Parker’s biography of Sid Vicious, No One Is Innocent. “I don’t care if you have to sleep on a f***ing park bench.”

Fortunately for Vicious, he didn’t have to bed down in Hyde Park. Instead, he soon found a squat at 39 New Court, Lutton Terrace, in the rather unlikely setting of Hampstead. Another temporary resident was John Lydon – or Johnny Rotten, as he was known in those days – whom Vicious was to join two years later in the Sex Pistols, ensuring a place for the address in punk folklore.

The flat belonged to a woman known only as Barbara, who had a fondness for housing waifs and strays in her spare room, and neglected to charge rent. It had no electricity or hot water, and was in such a poor state that Camden council once declared it unfit for habitation. The flat was “A1 squalor”, Dave Jones, a roadie, recalls in No One Is Innocent. “The sort of place rats are happy to vacate, given the option.”

Times have changed, of course, and rats are unlikely to turn up their whiskery noses at the place any more. The two low-rise buildings that make up New Court, a collection of 36 one-and two-bed flats, have been spruced up considerably since the days of Vicious and Rotten – and Genesis Homes, the housing association that owns it, is about to put 10 of the flats on sale.

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One-bedroom flats in the building start at £360,000; two-bedders, including the one in which the two Pistols lived, are expected to be priced at £425,000. Properties of a similar size elsewhere in the area sell for more than £500,000 – and they don’t come with salacious histories to entertain your dinner guests.

Claire Dobner, who works as a business director for BT, and her artist husband, Roy, have just bought a two-bedroom flat in New Court for £450,000, in which they intend to live with their children, Louie, 3, and two-month-old Huxley. They already own – and rent out – a three-bed flat in the building, which they bought from a former tenant who acquired it under the right-to-buy scheme.

“The person I bought my flat from told me Sid and Johnny used to throw kittens out of the window,” Claire says. “There are always lots of tourists in New Court, having a look. Lots of people who live here have grown up in the buildings, and were around when Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten lived here.

“I’m told Boy George used to live here, too, and Steve Took from the band T-Rex. The people who have lived in New Court for a while tell you lots of stories – it’s like a shared past that they pass on.”

Mel Hampson, a psychologist, moved into No 39 in 1981, after Took moved out. “I had to completely renovate the flat,” she says.

“It was covered in graffiti painted by Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten, which I stupidly painted over. I wish I hadn’t, as it could have been my pension fund – now, if I came across it, I’d live somewhere else and have tourists come round.

“One day, when I was working from home in the flat, a woman knocked on the door and told me that she had lived here with Sid and Johnny. She told me Sid only hurt one cat in their time in the flat – for some reason, in his drug-induced state, he felt the kitten had to die.”

Even without its celebrity residents, New Court, now Grade II-listed, would always have been a rather incongruous sight in genteel Hampstead. Dating to the 1850s, it was built to provide housing for the servants of the well-to-do families who lived in the elegant Georgian townhouses of nearby Flask Walk. According to a Camden council document, it is the second-oldest surviving example of council housing in Britain.

Steve Coleman, group director of development for Genesis Homes, says selling 10 of the flats was the only way to fund renovation of the block. “It needed a lot of money spent on it – it’s a listed building – and affordable housing obviously brings in low rent,” he says. “With bigger estates, you can pay for refurbishment by creating new flats. Here, you couldn’t build any more homes, so the only way was to sell some in order to pay for the whole development.”

A blog posted on the website of the Heath & Hampstead Society has urged that a blue plaque be placed outside No 39 to commemorate Vicious, who died of a heroin overdose aged 21 in 1979, after leaving New Court and the Sex Pistols. At the time, he was facing trial for the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen.

“The first and greatest of the UK punk bands, whose influence on music, fashion and design is still felt today,” the blog says. “Why not remember the place where Johnny Rotten and the Pistols composed God Save the Queen?”

At the moment, the only commemoration you’ll find outside New Court is one by Vicious himself: according to Claire Dobner, if you squint, you can just make out his name etched on one of the bricks.

The flats in New Court are being sold by Savills; 020 7472 5024, www.savills.co.uk

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