It all began with this paragraph: “Mr and Mrs Brown first met Paddington on a railway platform. In fact, that was how he came to have such an unusual name for a bear, for Paddington was the name of the station.”

That great English (and Darkest Peruvian) institution, Paddington Bear, is 50 this year. His creator, Michael Bond, is 82. Together they have sold more than 35 million books in 40 languages. Now Bond has written a new full-length Paddington book, which throws the much-loved bear with the hard stare into the mad modern world of car clampers, anti-burglar paint, limos, refugees – and being doorstepped by tabloid journalists.

Doorstepped by the quality press in his white stuccoed house on the canal in Little Venice, London, Bond could not be more welcoming. He has, as one might expect, Paddington’s good manners. Visitors’ coats are hung on proper hangers, and his wife Sue brings tea in china cups and rounds of shortbread. Bond settles down in a leather chair in his study, where the walls are covered in watercolours of R.W. Alley Paddington illustrations, and hundreds of books about France.

Bond seems a mite surprised to be back in the spotlight with Paddington. “I haven’t written a long one for nearly 30 years, wasn’t planning to, but the publishers asked me for the 50th birthday.” Perhaps he doubted his writerly skills in their ninth decade, but the book Paddington Here and Now is as funny as ever, going by tests with the proof copy on a willing eight-year-old.

“I wouldn’t take an advance for it,” said Bond, raising bushy eyebrows. “I wanted to be sure it worked. If a disaster hadn’t befallen Paddington within a few pages, something would have been terribly wrong. But it did.” The bear is arrested after his bun-filled shopping trolley is taken away by car clampers. We all know the feeling.

The original storybook, A Bear Called Paddington, was written in a mere ten days and published in October 1958, but it spawned an empire that was to go from picture books to television series to millions of stuffed toys and even Paddington dustbins. It is a fortune – to put it baldly – made off an illegal immigrant from Darkest Peru.

When Bond put the label “Please look after this bear” around Paddington’s neck, he was thinking mostly of the child refugees in wartime Britain and Europe. He was born in Newbury in Berkshire and left school at 14 during the war. “I saw those cinema newsreels of refugees pushing all their belongings across the countryside. People uprooted in mid-life. I see it again in Darfur – the worst thing is there is nowhere to escape to. That was the first image I had of Paddington, left alone with all his belongings in a small suitcase on a station platform.”

Paddington admits to being a stowaway who emigrated after his Aunt Lucy went into a home for retired bears, but not before she taught him English. So Paddington is bilingual, with a name changed “from the Peruvian one which no one can understand”, and “Funny clumsy things are always happening to me. I’m that sort of bear.”

He is an encouraging model for a new generation of British children and immigrants, to judge by the international surnames on the letters sent to Bond by Year 2 of Fleet Road Primary School in London. The mail piles up in Bond’s study. Italian children have sent photographs of a Paddington bear enjoying the sights, and the bear’s album includes shots on the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and Tokyo.

There’s a general acceptance among readers – and perhaps, more disturbingly, the Bond family – that Paddington is real. “No one in the book ever says, ‘Gosh, there’s a talking bear!’” says Bond. “People believe in him. They take him very seriously. With dolls, you’re always wondering what they’re going to wear, but you feel different with a bear, that you can tell him your secrets. There’s a solid, safe quality about them. In ancient times they were gods.” The original model for Paddington was bought by Bond in 1956 as a last-minute Christmas present for his first wife Brenda, with whom he has two grown-up children. “I share custody of Paddington with her. We change around every six months. It’s very amicable.”

Apparently 60 per cent of large Paddington bears are bought for grown-ups. It’s that English, slightly forced eccentricity exemplified by Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited and his bear, Aloysius – and by Christopher Robin and Pooh. Bond was once on a tour to Australia, with a promotional Paddington, and he was invited to the flight deck for a signing. The pilot asked if Paddington “could stay and help land the plane”. Even politicians anthropomorphise. “I heard that when David Cameron was dining at a restaurant, there were 13 at the table, so they added a Paddington,” says Bond.

With all this whimsical Englishness around, it had to be Stephen Fry who recorded the books. “He has a very good Paddington voice,” says Bond. “Stephen has a serious approach, slightly tongue in cheek, and he is knowledgeable about many things.” Fry and Bond were due to go to Peru to film a search for the endangered species upon which Paddington is based, “but the inoculations disagreed with me – dizzy spells – so I couldn’t go. Mind you, Stephen got ill with oysters in Lima.”

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