Story Sir John Betjeman is a poet that divides opinion. On the one hand his output is derided by the poetry establishment and on the other his verses are adored by the public , with his Collected Poems residing on over two million of our bookshelves.

It is for the latter group that experienced actor Lance Pierson has put together his new show, The Best of John Betjeman, which he will be performing at the cornerHOUSE arts centre in Tolworth next Friday.

“I perform shows about other poets including Milton and Gerard Manly Hopkins but Betjeman is the most popular by miles,” he says. “I appeal most to a non-scholarly audience and many people will come and say he is the only poet they like or understand.”

The Best of Betjeman tells the story of the late poets’ life which Pierson intersperses with some of the best known poems including Slough and A Subaltern's Love Song (Joan Hunter Dunn). With the help of a biography by Bevis Hillier, Pierson is able to shed some intersting new light on these much-loved verses.

He explains: “With the help of Hillier’s magisterial biography I discovered how autobiographical the poems are - it was only through the biography that I discovered how many of the poems are about his experiences and how he was working out his demons through his verse.”

In the show Pierson contextualises the poems to highlight their true meaning. Take Slough for example.

“He wrote Slough when he was 21 and a very angry young man,” he says. “People assume it must have been written in wartime because of the ’Come friendly bombs’ line, but he wrote it 1928 and he means anything that will cause destruction.”

What does he put Betjeman’s enduring popularity down to?

“There is certainly the simplicity of the poems and the subject matter. He is also within living memory and was famous for being on TV a lot. His Collected Poems have sold over two million copies and no other 20th century poet has got close to that.”

Pierson believes Betjeman did his best work during the middle period of his life, although he says the poet was acutely aware that he was not held in high regard by the great and the good of the poetry world at any point in his career.

“All his poems are in a traditional form - they rhyme, scan and have good rhythm,” says Pierson. “He was untouched by the modernist development of 20th century poetry and is quite limited as poets go. Mind you he is not as bad as some people say and he worked very hard. He certainly improved over the years.”

Earlier this year the latest selection of the Poet Laureate thrust Betjeman back into the spotlight after Wendy Cope ruled herself out of contention for the post in an article in which she called one of Betjeman’s first poem of his laureateship about the wedding of Princess Anne “embarrasingly bad”. Although Pierson admits the quality of Betjeman’s writing detriorated in his years as laureate the actor is happy to defend his Queen Anne piece.

“I think the poem is splendid but the press and the establishment look down their noses at him, even to this day,” he says. “I wrote a defence of the poem in the John Betjeman Society magazine and I’ve had a correspondence about it with Wendy Cope. The poem wasn’t profound but it reflected the mood of the nation which is what the Laureate should do.”

The Best of John Betjeman, cornerHOUSE, Tolworth, July 17, £9/£7, 8pm, 020 8296 9012, thecornerhouse.org