Digital Archive
& Stories Corner

John Keats is arguably the most significant literary figure ever to have lived in Hampstead. He moved to Wentworth Place (now Keats House) in 1818 with his friend Charles Brown, drawn to Hampstead's clean air and artistic community. It was here, sitting beneath a plum tree in the garden, that he composed "Ode to a Nightingale" in a single morning in May 1819 — now considered one of the greatest poems in the English language.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

— John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819)

Sigmund Freud arrived in Hampstead in June 1938, aged 82, fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna after the Anschluss. Despite his age and advanced mouth cancer, he continued to see patients and write at 20 Maresfield Gardens — a house secured with the help of Princess Marie Bonaparte. He completed his final major work, "Moses and Monotheism", at his desk here. Freud died in Hampstead on 23 September 1939, just 16 days after the outbreak of the Second World War.

"The mind is like an iceberg — it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water."

— Sigmund Freud, Attributed

John Constable first visited Hampstead in 1819, initially renting lodgings so his wife Maria could benefit from the healthier air away from London. He fell in love with the Heath's extraordinary skies and light, eventually settling in the village permanently. Between 1821 and 1822 alone, Constable produced over 50 sky studies painted directly on Hampstead Heath — a revolutionary approach to en plein air observation that changed European landscape painting. He died at his home on Well Walk in 1837 and is buried in the churchyard of St John's at the top of Church Row.

"The sky is the source of light in nature, and governs everything."

— John Constable, Letter to John Fisher, 1821

George Orwell (Eric Blair) lived in Hampstead during 1934–35 while working part-time in Booklovers' Corner, a second-hand bookshop in South End Green. He used his experiences — the dust, the damp, the eccentric customers — as material for his semi-autobiographical novel "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" (1936). Orwell described his Hampstead years as a period of personal struggle, living in poverty while writing, but the neighbourhood clearly influenced his sharp observations of class and respectability in English society.

"To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox."

— George Orwell, Why I Write (1946)