The Burgh House: Hampstead's Community Museum

Burgh House sits on New End Square, a quiet residential enclave off Flask Walk, in a Queen Anne mansion built in 1703 that has housed, over the centuries, a doctor, an army officer, a department store heiress, and the daughter of Rudyard Kipling. It is now a community arts centre and local history museum, run by volunteers, free to enter, and largely unknown to anyone who has not stumbled upon it.

The Building

The house is a handsome double-fronted structure in red brick with sash windows and a projecting bay. The interior retains its original panelling in several rooms and the proportions of a prosperous early 18th-century domestic interior. The Music Room, where concerts and events are held, is the finest of the main rooms — tall-ceilinged, light-filled, with the kind of acoustic that makes chamber music sound exactly as it should.

The Museum

The Hampstead Museum on the upper floor holds a collection of local history materials — paintings, photographs, maps, and artefacts relating to Hampstead's past. The Constable collection is particularly good: a number of his cloud studies, painted from the Heath in the 1820s, are displayed here, and the context provided by the local history setting gives them a specificity that gallery display cannot quite replicate.

The Buttery

The café in the basement — known as the Buttery — serves good coffee, soup, and sandwiches in a vaulted room that is one of the more unexpected lunch spots in North London. On a winter weekday it is almost entirely empty and entirely agreeable.