Just what is the link between Karl Marx and Bananarama?

At first glance, you’d never think this tiny tree-lined street – all white picket fences, rose gardens, and immaculately turned-out children – bears much cultural weight.

But we have made an astonishing discovery: Quadrant Grove, on the west Kentish/Gospel Oak borders, in fact connects everyone’s favourite socialist, Karl Marx, with 1980s girl band of the people, Bananarama.

Stay with us here: in fact, walk with us. Begin at adjoining Malden Place, off noisy thoroughfare Malden Road, admiring numbers 5 and 9, the townhouses once shared by the fun-loving popstrels back in the 1980s. And did you know that they still feature in the Guinness Book of World Records as the all-female group with the “most chart entries in the world”?

Contemplating that fact, now let’s wander up the slight incline of Quadrant Grove, where you can almost smell the honeysuckle wafting through the air, even in today’s chilly conditions. Dog-owners, note the cats, everywhere: under cars, on walls, scuttling behind bins.

At the Belsize Park end – we’re in the outer limits of NW5, postcode fans – regard the earliest, largest villas at the top left (nos 23-29, built 1849). Opposite the charming mid-19th century St Pancras Almshouses, once an asylum for “decayed and deserving ratepayers of the parish”*, dive into under-rated ye olde boozer, The Lord Southampton (currently boasting a lovely roaring fire).

And guess who used to enjoy an ale there? A beard-stroking Karl Marx, of course, who happened to live just a few feet away in Grafton Terrace at no.46 (formerly no.9). He and his family had fled to London in 1849 after the publication of The Communist Manifesto, and somewhat impoverished, the great socialist was forced to slum it as European correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune.

But their digs were at least something of a bargain: only £36 to rent per annum, with the downside that it was “not easy to get to…[with] building going on all around…” In fact, wrote Marx, “it was dark in those wild districts.”* Don’t blame him, then, for regular sessions at the Lord S.

So there we have it. Bananarama to Karl Marx in twenty paces.

PS: what else do they have in common? They were both Really Saying Something. Boom.