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Hampstead
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Hampstead is an area of London, England, located north-west of Charing Cross. It is part of the London Borough of Camden. It is situated within Inner London. It is known for its intellectual, artistic, musical and literary associations and for the large and hilly parkland Hampstead Heath. It is also home to some of the most expensive housing in the London area, or indeed anywhere in the world, with large houses regularly listed for sale at over twenty million pounds sterling.
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Encyclopedia
Hampstead is an area of London, England, located north-west of Charing Cross. It is part of the London Borough of Camden. It is situated within Inner London. It is known for its intellectual, artistic, musical and literary associations and for the large and hilly parkland Hampstead Heath. It is also home to some of the most expensive housing in the London area, or indeed anywhere in the world, with large houses regularly listed for sale at over twenty million pounds sterling. The village of Hampstead has more millionaires within its boundaries than any other area of Britain.
Etymology
The name comes from the Anglo-Saxon words hæmpe and stede, meaning "settlement near pigs".
History
Although early records of Hampstead can be found in a grant by King Ethelred the Unready to the monastery of St. Peter’s at Westminster (AD 986) and it is referred to in the Domesday Book (1086), the history of Hampstead is generally traced back to the 17th century.
Trustees of the Well started advertising the medicinal qualities of the chalybeate waters (water impregnated with iron) in 1700. Although Hampstead Wells was initially most successful and fashionable, its popularity declined in the 1800s due to competition with other fashionable London spas. The spa was demolished in 1882, although a water fountain was left behind.
Hampstead started to expand following the opening of the North London Railway in the 1860s (now the London Overground with passenger services operated by Transport for London), and expanded further after the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead Railway opened in 1907 (now part of London Underground's Northern Line) and provided fast travel to central London.
Much luxurious housing was created during the 1870s and 1880s, in the area that is now the political ward of Frognal & Fitzjohns. Much of this housing remains to this day.
During the 20th Century, a number of notable buildings were created. These include:
Of these, the Hampstead Theatre relocated in 2003 to the present Swiss Cottage site (increasing capacity from 140 to 325 seats) and the Swiss Cottage leisure centre was closed for rebuilding in 2003 and reopened in 2006.
Cultural attractions in the area include the Freud Museum, Keats' House, Kenwood House, Fenton House, The Isokon building, and the Camden Arts Centre. The large Victorian Hampstead Library and Town Hall was recently converted and extended as a creative industries centre.
Though now considered an integral part of London, Hampstead has retained much of its village atmosphere and charm, with Hampstead High Street playing a vital role in the day to day life of a Hampsteadian.
On 14 August 1975 Hampstead entered the UK Weather Records with the Highest 155-min total rainfall at 169 mm. As of July 2006 this record remains.
Mark Pevsner, the grandson of Sir Nicholas Pevsner, described Hampstead as "a large collection of roads and passages which don't go in straight lines, houses of different ages, many of them good architecture but more often it's just the way they fit together, full of nice vistas and surprises. Hampstead is a huge collection of twists and turns."
The area is now home to one of the largest Kings College London residences, Hampstead Campus (University of London).
Politics
Hampstead became part of the County of London in 1889 and in 1899 the Metropolitan Borough of Hampstead was formed. The borough town hall on Haverstock Hill, which was also the location of the Registry Office, can be seen in newsreel footage of many celebrity civil marriages. In 1965 the metropolitan borough was abolished and is former area merged with that of the Metropolitan Borough of Holborn and the Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras to form the modern-day London Borough of Camden.
Hampstead is part of the Hampstead and Highgate constituency and since 1992 the member of parliament has been the former actress Glenda Jackson of the Labour Party.
The area has a significant tradition of educated liberal humanism, sometimes referred to (occasionally disparagingly) as "Hampstead Liberalism".
The area is also home to the left-wing Labour magazine, Tribune and the satirical magazine the Hampstead Village Voice.
Notable current and former residents
Hampstead has long been known as a residence of the intelligentsia, including writers, composers, and intellectuals, actors, artists and architects — many of whom created a bohemian community in the late 19th century. In the 1930s it became base to a community of avant garde artists and writers and was host to a number of émigrés and exiles from Nazi Europe.
Famous past inhabitants have included:
- Lord Edgar Adrian—nobel-prize winning physiologist
- Sir Kingsley Amis — novelist and poet
- Martin Amis—writer; son of Kingsley
- Sir Alan Ayckbourn - playwright
- Sir A. J. Ayer — philosopher, philanderer
- Michael Ayrton – artist, sculptor, painter
- Nigel Balchin – writer, psychologist
- Sir Arnold Bax — impressionist composer
- Cecil Beaton — society man, fashion photographer, style icon
- John S. Beckett — musician, composer and conductor
- Sybille Bedford — writer, essayist
- Sir Isaiah Berlin— philosopher, historian of ideas, man of letters
- Professor John Desmond Bernal - crystalographer
- Sir John Betjeman—poet
- Arthur Bliss — composer
- Dirk Bogarde — actor
- Arthur Boyd — Australian painter and sculptor
- Marcel Breuer — modernist Hungarian architect and refugee
- Sir Richard Burton — explorer
- Richard Burton—Hollywood actor
- Lord Byron — poet
- Elias Canetti — nobel prize winning novelist
- John le Carré — author
- Allan Chappelow Author, expert on George Bernard Shaw, recluse millionaire; murdered in his Downshire Hill House 2008;
- Dame Agatha Christie — author
- Lord Clark— art-historian
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge— romantic poet and philosopher
- John Constable — artist
- Peter Cook — writer and comedian
- Milein Cosman — artist
- Charles de Gaulle — leader of the Free French Forces during WW2
- Charles Dickens — author
- Jacqueline du Pré — cellist
- Daphne du Maurier
- Sir Edward Elgar — composer
- T. S. Eliot — poet
- Sir William Empson— poet and renowned man of letters
- Marianne Faithfull
- Ian Fleming — author, creator of James Bond
- John Fowles — novelist, lived on Church Row for many years
- Anna Freud
- Lucian Freud — artist
- Sigmund Freud — psychoanalyst and philosopher
- Naum Gabo — artist
- John Galsworthy—Nobel Prize winning novelist
- Hugh Gaitskell — renowned leader of the Labour Party (1955-63)
- Margaret Gardiner — artist, friend of Barbara Hepworth, partner of Prof. John Desmond Bernal, mother of Prof. Martin Bernal
- Erno Goldfinger — architect
- Sir Ernst Gombrich — art historian, man of letters
- Walter Gropius — architect and designer
- Thom Gunn — poet
- Thierry Henry — football player
- Audrey Hepburn — actress
- Barbara Hepworth
- Freddie Highmore— actor
- Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse— sociologist
- Elizabeth Jane Howard— novelist and actress
- Saul Hudson (Slash) — musician
- Sir Andrew Huxley — nobel laureate
- Aldous Huxley — novelist, spiritualist
- Leigh Hunt — romantic poet
- Mahomed Ali Jinnah founding father of Pakistan and a notable barrister
- Samuel Johnson— poet, aphorist, essayist, biographer, lexicographer, wit - typically known as 'Dr Johnson'
- Katrina Kaif — Bollywood Actress
- John Keats — poet lived at Wentworth Place, now Keats House
- Hans Keller — musician and writer
- Lillie Langtry
- D. H. Lawrence — author
- Doris Lessing nobel prize winning novelist
- Lord Leverhulme William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme, soapmaker and philanthropist
- Berthold Lubetkin
- Anna Mahler — sculpturess and daughter of Alma Schindler and Gustav Mahler
- Ramsay MacDonald— former Prime Minister
- Thomas Mawson Landscape gardener, founder of the Landscape Institute, Designer of the garden of Lord Leverhulme's The Hill House in Hampstead
- Lord Yehudi Menuhin — violinist, conductor, child-prodigy, virtuoso
- A. A. Milne — author of "Winnie the Pooh"
- Sir Jonathan Miller
- Lee Miller — photographer, fashion model, actress, war correspondent
- Piet Mondrian painter
- Henry Moore — sculptor
- Marie-Louise Von Motesiczky — expressionist painter
- Florence Nightingale — humanitarian
- George Orwell — author
- Peter O'Toole —
- Anna Pavlova — ballerina
- Sir Roger Penrose — mathematician, theoretical physicist, philosopher, attended UCS
- Roland Penrose — artist and curator, surrealist, founder of the ICA
- J. B. Priestley — author
- Charles Saatchi— billionaire advertising executive and sponsor of the contemporary arts
- Mary Shelley— novelist, creator of Frankenstein
- Percy Bysshe Shelley— poet and romantic
- Sir Neil Shields— financier
- Sir Percy Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke — Governor of the Seychelles, 1947–1951
- Stephen Spender — poet, man of letters, grew up in Frognal Gardens and schooled at UCS
- Robert Louis Stevenson. House with blue plaque corner of Holly Walk and Mount Vernon, built as St Mary's Roman Catholic girls School
- Marie Stopes —world-renowned feminist and campaigner for birth-control
- Elizabeth Taylor— actress
- Eric Thompson — actor, producer, father of Sophie Thompson and Emma Thompson; married to Phyllida Law.
- Evelyn Waugh — author
- H. G. Wells — author
- Richard Wollheim — renowned philosopher of art
- William Wordsworth — poet
Hampstead is currently and has been recently home to:
Sites
To the north and east of Hampstead, and separating it from Highgate, is London's largest ancient parkland, Hampstead Heath, which includes the well-known and legally-protected view of the London skyline from Parliament Hill. The Heath, a major place for Londoners to walk and "take the air", has three open-air public swimming ponds; one for men, one for women, and one for mixed bathing, which were originally reservoirs for drinking water and part of the River Fleet. The bridge pictured is known locally as 'The Red Arches', built in fruitless anticipation of residential building on the Heath in the 19th century.
Local activities include major open-air concerts on summer Saturday evenings on the slopes below Kenwood House, book and poetry readings, fun fairs on the lower reaches of the Heath, period harpsichord recitals at Fenton House, Hampstead Scientific Society and Hampstead Photographic Society.
The largest employer in Hampstead is the Royal Free Hospital, Pond Street, but many small businesses based in the area have international significance. George Martin's , in converted church premises in Lyndhurst Road, is a current example, as Jim Henson's Creature Shop was, before it relocated to California.
The area has some remarkable architecture, such as the Isokon building in Lawn Road, a Grade I listed experiment in collective housing, once home to Agatha Christie, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Walter Gropius. It was recently restored by Notting Hill Housing Trust.
Museums
Places of Interest
Cinemas
Hampstead Locations on Cinema Film
Hampstead's rural feel lends itself for use on film. Notable eamples are: The Killing of Sister George, 1968, starring Beryl Reid and Susannah York. The opening sequence has the character June, played by Reid, wandering through the streets and alleyways of Hampstead west of Heath Street around The Mount Square. The pub in the film, "The Marquis of Granby’, in which June, played by Reid, drinks at the opening of the movie, is the old The Holly Bush, 22 Holly Mount, NW3 6SG. Another example is The Collector starring Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar, 1965, where the kidnap sequence is set in Mount Vernon; more recently the house in the in-film film set scene of Notting Hill, 1999, is Kenwood House; outdoor scenes in The Wedding Date, 2005, starring Debra Messing feature Parliament Hill Fields on the Heath, overlooking west London. Four Weddings and a Funeral features the old Hampstead Town Hall on Haverstock Hill. The cult film Scenes of a Sexual Nature was filmed entirely on Hampstead Heath, covering various picturesque locations such as the 'Floating Gardens' and Kenwood House.
A musical specifically focusing on the area, Les Bicyclettes de Belsize, 1968, tells the story of a young man's cycle journey around Hampstead. After crashing into a billboard poster, he falls in love with the fashion model depicted on it
Churches
Pubs
Hampstead is well known for its traditional pubs, such as the Holly Bush, gas lit until recently; the Spaniard's Inn, Spaniard's Road, where highwayman Dick Turpin took refuge); The Old Bull and Bush in North End; and Ye Olde White Bear. Jack Straw's Castle on the edge of the Heath near Whitestone Pond at the brow of the Heath has now been converted into residential flats. Others include:
- Freemasons Arms in Downshire Hill
- The Duke of Hamilton
- Ye Olde White Bear
- The Holly Bush, 22 Holly Mount, NW3 6SG
- The Horseshoe
- King William IV
- The Magdala, in South Hill Park, where Ruth Ellis killed her lover David Blakely in 1955.
- The Garden Gate
Restaurants
Hampstead has an eclectic mix of restaurants ranging from French to Thai. Notable and longstanding are Gaucho, Jin Kichi, Tip Top Thai, La Gaffe, Al Casbah and Le Cellier du Midi. CrimeaJewel.
Schools
Transport
Nearest places
Nearest tube stations
Nearest railway station
Nearest hospital
External links
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