Hidden on New End Square, Burgh House is a Queen Anne mansion turned community arts centre and local history museum. Free to enter, rarely crowded, and entirely worth your time.
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.
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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.
## What is actually inside
Burgh House is a red-brick Queen Anne merchant's house at New End Square, built 1704 for William Eades and now run as a local-history museum and cafe by a volunteer trust. The ground-floor galleries rotate two or three exhibitions a year — usually something combining Hampstead's social history with an art show. When I last went, the front room had a small display on Hampstead during the Blitz and the back gallery had watercolours by a Heath regular. Entry is free. The museum is open Wednesday to Sunday, 12pm to 5pm, closed Monday and Tuesday.
## The Music Room
Upstairs, the first-floor Music Room is worth going up for even if you don't follow the exhibitions. It seats around 100 and hosts a Sunday lunchtime concert series — chamber music, usually young professionals from the Guildhall or Royal College — around £15 at the door, £12 online. The programme is posted on the Burgh House website about six weeks in advance. Arrive by 11:45 for a 12pm start; seats are unreserved and the room fills.
## The Buttery cafe
The garden-facing basement cafe — the Buttery — is the reason many people in Hampstead actually come to Burgh House. The food is better than it needs to be: soups made in-house, a small blackboard of hot lunches (usually a quiche, a stew, and a fish option), cakes that feel homemade because they are, and a working espresso machine. Lunches are around £12 to £15, cakes £4. It is open Wednesday to Sunday, 11am to 5pm, and 7pm on concert evenings. The terrace, which opens onto the garden, is one of the nicest outdoor eating spots in Hampstead in summer. No bookings; turn up and wait if it is full.
## The local-history archive
Burgh House holds the Hampstead Heritage Archive — an astonishing amount of material about the neighbourhood that otherwise wouldn't be anywhere. Photographs, maps, pamphlets, business records, first-hand accounts of the Blitz, material about the original Hampstead spa. Researchers can book a slot by emailing the archivist (contact on the website); it is free. If you are tracing a family history connection to Hampstead, start here.
## What the building itself tells you
Burgh House is one of only two surviving Queen Anne houses on a central Hampstead street (the other is Fenton House on the other side of the village). The staircase with its twisted balusters, the carved door pediments, the oak-panelled Music Room — all survive roughly as built. In the 1720s the house was owned by the Rev. Allatson Burgh, from whom it takes its name. The Grand Duke Alexander of Russia was a guest in 1805. The house was nearly demolished in 1945 after the war; the borough council bought it, and volunteer preservation began in 1979.
## Getting there
Five minutes' walk from Hampstead tube. Take Flask Walk to New End Square; the house is the red-brick one behind a small courtyard on the left.
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Written by
Oliver Hartwell
Oliver is a lifelong Hampstead resident and architectural historian who has spent three decades uncovering the stories behind the village's Georgian terraces, hidden lanes, and literary landmarks. His writing blends meticulous research with a warm, accessible style.
