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Insular, villagey
Hampstead has long been popular with the literati and
chattering classes. Pope and Gay took the waters here
during its brief time as a spa; Wilkie Collins, Thackeray
and Dickens drank at Jack Straw's Castle on North End
Way; and Keats strolled on the Heath with Coleridge and
Wordsworth. Much of Keats's best work was composed in his
house in Wentworth Place; it was in its garden that he
heard his nightingale. Happily, Hampstead's hilly
geography has prevented the sort of urbanisation that
Camden has suffered, and it remains, together with
Highgate, a haven for much of London's (monied)
intelligentsia and literary bigwigs. It's entirely
appropriate that Hampstead's MP is ex-actress Glenda
Jackson.
Hampstead tube stands at the top of the steep High
Street, lined with opulent but unexciting shops and bars.
Running north, and further uphill, from here is Heath
Street. Don't miss the dark and inviting Louis
Pâtisserie (no.32) for tea and fabulously sticky
mittel-European cakes. Just off the southern end of Heath
Street is Church Row, one of Hampstead's most beautiful
streets, with twin lines of higgeldy-piggeldy terraces
leading down to St John at Hampstead, where painter John
Constable and his wife lie at rest in the sylvan
graveyard. Close by, on Holly Hill, is Hampstead's nicest
pub, the Hollybush; while another minute's climb brings
you to Fenton House on Hampstead Grove, with its fine
porcelain and paintings. The celestially inclined might
like to gaze skyward at the nearby Hampstead Scientific
Society Observatory (Lower Terrace; 8346 1056). On
Hampstead's southern fringes is the house where Sigmund
Freud lived the last year of his life, having fled Nazi
persecution in Vienna in 1938 (now the Freud Museum; ).
Nearby is Camden Arts Centre, with its eclectic programme
of exhibitions.
East of Heath Street is a maze of attractive streets that
shelters Burgh House on New End Square (a Queen Anne
house that now houses a small museum) and 2 Willow Road,
a modernist house built by Hungarian-born Ernö
Goldfinger for himself in the 1930s. Nearby, off Keats
Grove, is Keats' House. Around the corner, on South Hill
Park, Ruth Ellis shot her former boyfriend outside the
Magdala pub in 1955 (look for the bullet holes in the
wall), and became the last woman to be hanged in Britain.
from timeout.com (see links)
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