Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
HAMPSTEAD WHO'S WHO
Over the years, countless writers, artists and politicos have been drawn to Hampstead, which
has more blue plaques commemorating its residents than any other London borough.
John
Constable
lived here in the 1820s, trying to make ends meet for his wife and seven children
and painting cloud formations on the Heath, several of which hang in the V&A.
John Keats
moved into Well Walk in 1817, to nurse his dying brother, then moved to a semi-detached villa,
fell in love with the girl next door, bumped into Coleridge on the Heath and in 1821 went to
Rome to die; the villa is now a museum (see opposite). In 1856,
Karl Marx
finally achieved
bourgeois respectability when he moved into Grafton Terrace, a new house on the south side
of the Heath.
Robert Louis Stevenson
stayed here when he was 23 suffering from
tuberculosis, and thought it “the most delightful place for air and scenery”.
Author
H.G. Wells
lived on Church Row for three years just before World War I. In the same
period, the photographer
Cecil Beaton
was attending a local infants' school, and was bullied
there by author
Evelyn Waugh
- the start of a lifelong feud. The composer
Edward Elgar
,
who lived locally, became a special constable during the war, joining the Hampstead Volunteer
Reserve.
D.H. Lawrence
, and his German wife Frieda, watched the first major Zeppelin raid on
London from the Heath in 1915 and decided to leave. Following the war, Lawrence's friend and
fellow writer,
Katherine Mansfield
, lived for a couple of years in a big grey house overlooking
the Heath, which she nicknamed “The Elephant”. Actor
Dirk Bogarde
was born in a taxi in
Hampstead in 1921.
Stephen Spender
spent his childhood in “an ugly house” on Frognal, and
went to school locally.
Elizabeth Taylor
was born in Hampstead in 1932, and came back to
live here in the 1950s during her first marriage to Richard Burton.
In the 1930s, Hampstead's modernist Isokon Flats, on Lawn Road, became something of an
artistic hangout, particularly its drinking den, the
Isobar
: architect
Walter Gropius
, and artists
Henry Moore
,
Ben Nicholson
and his wife
Barbara Hepworth
all lived here (Moore moved
out in 1940, when his studio was bombed, and retired to Herefordshire); another tenant,
Agatha
Christie
, compared the exterior to a giant ocean liner. Architect
Ernö Goldfinger
built his
modernist family home at 2 Willow Rd, now a museum, (see opposite) and local resident
Ian
Fleming
named James Bond's adversary after him.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah
abandoned India
for Hampstead in 1932, living a quiet life with his daughter and sister, and working as a lawyer.
George Orwell
lived rent-free above Booklovers' Corner, a bookshop on South End Road, in
1934, in return for services in the shop in the afternoon;
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
has many echoes
of Hampstead and its characters.
Sigmund Freud
spent the last year of his life in Hampstead,
having reluctantly left Austria, following the Nazi Anschluss; his house is now a museum (see
below). Artist
Piet Mondrian
also escaped to Hampstead from Nazi-occupied Paris, only to be
bombed out a year later, after which he fled to New York. Nobel Prize-winning writer
Elias
Canetti
was another refugee from Nazi-occupied Europe, as was
Oskar Kokoschka
who, along
with photomontage artist John Heartfield, was given assistance by the Hampstead-based Artists
Refugee Committee, set up by local Surrealist artist, Roland Penrose.
General de Gaulle
lived on
Frognal with his wife and two daughters and got some first-hand experience of Nazi air raids.
Ruth Ellis
, the last woman to be hanged in Britain in 1955, shot her lover outside the
Magdala Tavern
by Hampstead Heath train station.
Sid Vicious
and
Johnny Rotten
lived in a
squat on Hampstead High Street in 1976.
John le Carré
lived here in the 1980s and 1990s and
set a murder in
Smiley's People
on Hampstead Heath.
Michael Foot
, the former Labour leader,
lived in a house he bought in 1945 with his redundancy cheque from
The Evening Standard
until the age of 96. Actors Hugh Grant and Stephen Fry, writer Doris Lessing and pop stars
Robbie Williams and George Michael have homes here.
20
Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens • Wed-Sun noon-5pm • £6 •
T
020 7435 2002,
W
freud.org.uk •
!
Finchley Road
One of the most poignant of London's house museums is the
Freud Museum
in the
leafy suburban streets of south Hampstead. Having fled Vienna after the Anschluss,
Sigmund Freud
arrived in London in the summer of 1938, and was immediately
Britain's most famous Nazi exile. He had been diagnosed as having cancer way back in
1923 (he was an inveterate cigar-smoker) and given just five years to live. He lasted
sixteen, but was a semi-invalid when he arrived in London, and rarely left the house
