129 Beaufort Street – Quentin Crisp’s Flat
Forty-one years, and the dirt that never got worse
Quentin Crisp – born Denis Charles Pratt in 1908 – moved into the first-floor flat at 129 Beaufort Street in 1940 and stayed forty-one years. He never cleaned it: “After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.” He lived as an openly effeminate gay man when this was dangerous, surviving regular violence, walking through Soho in makeup and dyed hair.
His memoir The Naked Civil Servant (1968) was filmed by ITV in 1975 with John Hurt, bringing his extraordinary story to a mass audience. At 72, in 1981, he emigrated to New York, where he lived out his life in a single room in the East Village. He died in 1999, the night before a one-man show was due to open in Manchester. In this flat he became famous; then he left, and never came back either. No blue plaque marks it.