‘There can be a smugness in suburbia'

The Glebe Road resident is one Britain's best loved poets, who produced The Mersey Sound: Penguin Modern Poets' with Brian Patten and Adrian Henri and was a member of The Scaffold from 1963-73 producing anthems Lily the Pink' and Thank You'. He is a member of the Executive Council of the Poetry Society. In 1997 he was awarded an OBE and was recently awarded the Freedom of the City of Liverpool.

Roger McGough, 65, ushers me into his home where boogie boards are propped up against the wall and there are many signs of a warm family life. Crammed bookshelves stretch across the wall of the living room and there are more signs of children.

The poet asks whether I might be more comfortable inside the house or in the garden through the conservatory which the living room opens out onto. It is a warm day and we sit outside on fold-up chairs. Near the back fence a child's swing hangs from an apple tree. McGough has lived in Barnes for 12 years. He is father to four children, the eldest two Tom and Finne both work in television. His youngest, Matthew, 16, and Elizabeth, both attended St Osmund's Primary School. Matthew is now at the London Orartory and Elizabeth attends Sacred Heart.

He and his wife Hilary were living in the hub of things in Notting Hill Gate on the Portabello Road before they came to Barnes. When asked what it was that originally brought him to London from Liverpool, he said: "Love, and various reasons like I had been involved with the Scaffold and they split up and my marriage split up and I was looking for a change."

When asked about the love that brought him to London, he said it was for his wife Hilary, whom he had met at a bus stop in Liverpool. "Very romantic," he jokes. Hilary, a biochemist, originally from Yorkshire, was lecturing at a college in Liverpool before she left for London to do an MSC in health science.

When they first lived in Barnes, he says he missed the liveliness of Notting Hill Gate, but they had a second child together and needed somewhere bigger and Barnes had made a strong impression on McGough whilst he was doing some work in Merton.

He said: "I had been filming at studios in Merton and the taxi used to bring us back through Barnes. We were in the country one minute and the next minute we were at Hammersmith Bridge.

"I still miss the wackiness of Notting Hill Gate, but there are many compensations living in this area and the things that I miss it for, well you get to an age when you are not using those things anyway."

He said that whilst he had expected, upon leaving Notting Hill, that the family would make frequent trips to London, Richmond soon became the common destination for shopping trips, etc.

He said: "We look more towards Richmond as a family, although when we left Notting Hill Gate, I thought we would always be going to Hammersmith and the Portabello Road, but you don't."

Of Barnes, he said: "Physically, it can be quiet and with my work I need to be quiet. People are nice, they keep to themselves."

He said that he had ended up living in the kind of place he would have ridiculed as a young man.

He said: "I was brought up in Liverpool by the Docks in a very poor area in a row of terraced houses. This would be the sort of place I would have taken the piss out of. 20 years later I find myself living here, but I wasn't born to it.

"Many people in Barnes just stay because they like it so much, many are born in Barnes and live here all their lives and I think that says a lot for the place. If I feel like an outsider sometimes, maybe that just comes with the job, rather than the place.

"Most people around here have jobs in the City and very rigorous work schedules. I do too, but it is a very different sort of work."

When asked whether Barnes ever influences his poetry, he said: "Some poems are written about the place or sort of about suburban life. There can be a certain smugness in suburbia, but at the same time people work hard."

McGough once described the Thames as: "The Thames (as it likes to be called) gives a passable impression of a river."

He also told me of an encounter with a large rat on Barnes Common, which inspired a rather surreal poem which ended with a large bear appearing and doing away with the rat.

When not abroad, he spends his days writing at home, with visits to the Coach and Horses and the Bull. He likes to jog around Barnes Common and plays boules at the Sun Inn.

His wife Hilary has recently started working with the Barnes Community Association.

He said: "She is very much involved with life here and got straight into it as a mother."

Since doing her MSC when she first came to London, his wife went on to work for the BBC for programmes such as Tomorrow's World and You and Yours. After having children, she left the BBC and took a job teaching part time at Thames Valley University. She has also collaborated with McGough on books including a children's anthology.

He describes the changes he has seen in Barnes, the decline of the small shops and the appearance of a theatre for all the actors living in the area.

He remembers that when he first came to Barnes, he bumped into Colin Weller, who wrote Chariots of Fire, and remarked to him upon the fact that the place was so full of actors, but there was no theatre.

He praised highly the Old Sorting Office development, where he has given a reading, saying: "It is really good and much needed in Barnes, there is a nice restaurant and bar and a good theatre space."

He is extremely positive about the area and says he does not want to "moan", but when pressed about its pitfalls he said: "Well, whilst we are talking, planes are going over and they are building another terminal."

When asked whether peace and quiet is something he needs, he said: "I like pubs and going out, maybe I like to control the noise. Yes, when I work, I have to work quietly. I don't have music and sounds on, as other people might."

He regrets the loss of traditional pubs as generic chains move in. He said: "They have now gone all posh, but they used to be places where people could go out and be in a community area, there would be gossip and if you wanted to find a plumber or an electrician you could."

He also thinks there aren't enough local shops in Barnes, although he says there are plenty selling wrapping paper: "The butchers and the fish shop are hanging on, what we need is always another gift shop. The grocers has closed since I have been here. Things do recur and come around again, you just watch them change, like the trees on the leaves turning yellow and falling off and then coming through green again.

"There are quite a lot of elderly people in Barnes and there is a day centre on the Green for them and there is talk of them closing it down. That would be such a pity, it is very well used."

McGough isn't bothered much by local traffic because he always takes the bus and it is here that ideas often come to him.

Buses, bus conductors and passengers do appear in McGough's work. When asked about this, he explained: "Buses are a little microcosm. I like to listen to the conversations you get in buses and in cafes and I carry a notebook and jot things down, I might hear something or see something."

The poet has no plans to move from the area. He said: "Many of my friends did move away from London, but I think have the best of both worlds. Barnes is an oasis, I enjoy that. In Barnes you can be very cut off, I like my isolation within easy reach. I wouldn't want to move out to the middle of Dartmoor as that would freak me out.

"The longer you stay, the more you like it and I have nice neighbours and good friends here."

He and his wife are members of St Osmund's Church, where at Christmas McGough gave a reading. He said: "There is certainly more of a community feel here than at Notting Hill Gate where you didn't know your next door neighbour. Here it is a wider group of people. At the pub you can meet a fishmonger, a civil servant, an IT consultant, there is quite a nice mix."

His recent work has included his own interpretation of the Carnival of the Animals with the Liverpool Philharmonic, which he will also be performing with the London Symphobia. This month a CD of his work entitled Lively' is out.

He was asked to contribute to a regeneration of Liverpool city centre after it was voted the European Cultural City by writing a poem which would be cut into the granite of a fountain for the city centre.

Next Monday he begins his stint as poet in residence at The Poetry Society, which will last from September 22 to October 9, including National Poetry Day. He will be giving readings one with Andrew Motion at St Paul's and one at the Dinner with' National Portrait Gallery.

A collection of his poems and All the Best', a selection of his children's poems, will be in the shops shortly.

He runs poetry courses one in Deja in Majorca where Robert Graves lived and died. For more information on Roger, see www.rogermcgough.org.uk