Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens

Before the time of Wendy, Tinker Bell and Captain Hook, before even Never-Never Land itself, Peter Pan was an ordinary baby.

All babies, having been birds before they were humans, were ‘a little wild during the first few weeks, and very itchy about the shoulders, where their wings used to be’. But, unlike other babies, Peter decided to escape and flew away over the rooftops back to Kensington Gardens.

But it was by no means a simple matter for Peter to resume life as a bird and, as is pointed out to him early on by Solomon Caw, his destiny is to be a ‘Betwixt-and Between’.

From being trapped on the island in the Serpentine and escaping in a boat made out of a bird’s nest, to learning the ways of the fairies whose best trick is to pretend to be something else, usually a flower Peter Pan’s adventures in the enchanted world of ‘the little people’ are where the legend began.