More than anywhere else in London, Hampstead has been home to the people who shaped how we think. Poets, painters, scientists, revolutionaries and Nobel laureates — an extraordinary concentration of talent that arrived in NW3 for the same reasons: the Heath, the air, the distance from the city, and the particular intellectual community that formed here. This is the story of the people behind the blue plaques.

The Poets: Keats, Shelley and the Romantic Circle

John Keats is the presiding spirit of Hampstead. He lived at what is now Keats House on Keats Grove from 1818 to 1820 — two of the most productive years in the history of English poetry. He wrote Ode to a Nightingale under a plum tree in the garden, inspired by a bird singing in the branches above him. He wrote Ode on a Grecian Urn and La Belle Dame Sans Merci here too. The house is now a museum, meticulously preserved, and one of the most moving literary sites in London.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was a regular visitor, often walking up from central London to call on Keats and discuss the craft of poetry. Leigh Hunt, the critic and poet who introduced Keats to Shelley, lived on the Vale of Health — the secluded hamlet deep in the Heath. It was Hunt who published Keats's first serious poems and set his career in motion.

John Constable: The Man Who Painted the Sky

John Constable moved to Hampstead in 1821 with his wife Maria and their growing family. He rented a series of houses on Well Walk, Lower Terrace, and finally on Church Row. He came for Maria's health — she had tuberculosis — but stayed because the Heath transformed his art. Between 1821 and 1828, Constable made more than a hundred studies of Hampstead skies — what he called "skying." They changed the history of landscape painting. He is buried in St John-at-Hampstead churchyard, under a simple headstone near the south wall. His grave is easy to find and still visited by painters from around the world.

Sigmund Freud: The Final Year

Freud fled Vienna in June 1938, two weeks after the Anschluss. He was 82 and had cancer of the jaw. The Nazis allowed him to leave after the payment of a substantial "emigration tax" — a ransom, effectively. He came to London and was installed at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, in a house arranged by the psychoanalytic community. He brought everything with him: his library of 2,000 books, his antiquities collection of over 2,000 objects, and his famous couch. He died in Maresfield Gardens in September 1939, one month after the outbreak of war. The house is now the Freud Museum and is exactly as he left it.

George Orwell: The Bookshop on South End Road

George Orwell worked in a second-hand bookshop at 1 South End Road from 1934 to 1935, while writing Keep the Aspidistra Flying. He lived above the shop, survived on very little money, and was characteristically miserable about the whole experience — which he then channelled brilliantly into the novel's portrait of Gordon Comstock, trapped in a bookshop while the world outside accelerates away from him. The building no longer exists as a bookshop but is marked. Orwell was also a regular at the Hampstead pubs, and his diaries from this period contain some of his best observations of London street life.

Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca Born in Hampstead

Daphne du Maurier lived at Cannon Hall on Cannon Place from 1916, when her family moved there, until the 1930s. She wrote much of Rebecca — published in 1938, one of the best-selling novels of the twentieth century — at her family's Hampstead home. The opening line ("Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again") was drafted in the house. Cannon Hall, on the edge of the Heath, is a substantial late-Georgian mansion that remains a private residence. There is a blue plaque on the wall.

D.H. Lawrence: The Vale of Health

D.H. Lawrence and Frieda von Richthofen lived in the Vale of Health briefly in 1915, in a small cottage beside the pond. It was a turbulent period: the First World War was underway, Lawrence was struggling to publish The Rainbow, and the Vale cottage became a meeting point for a circle that included Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes, Katherine Mansfield, and Aldous Huxley. The cottage no longer stands, but the Vale of Health remains one of the strangest and most atmospheric corners of the Heath.

Karl Marx: An Unlikely Connection

Karl Marx spent his most productive years in London, though he is more associated with Soho and Kentish Town than Hampstead. But Marx was a regular walker on Hampstead Heath — he and Friedrich Engels would walk up from central London on Sundays for what he called "picnics." His daughter Eleanor Marx lived in Hampstead in the 1880s. Marx is buried at Highgate Cemetery, a short walk from Hampstead Village, under a monument that has become a pilgrimage site for visitors from across the world.

Rabindranath Tagore: Poetry on the Heath

Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, lived in Hampstead on several visits to London. He stayed on Villas on the Heath and later at a house on Well Walk, and walked on the Heath while working on the Gitanjali poems — the collection that brought him the Nobel Prize. W.B. Yeats, who wrote the preface to the English translation, met Tagore in Hampstead. The connection between the Heath's particular light and quietness and the meditative quality of Tagore's poetry is one that visitors still feel.

The Blue Plaques Trail

The simplest way to experience Hampstead's literary and artistic history is to follow the blue plaques. The main concentration runs along Flask Walk, Heath Street, Well Walk, Church Row, and the streets between the village and the Heath. A suggested route:

  • Start at Keats House on Keats Grove — allow 45 minutes inside
  • Walk north to Well Walk — Constable, and later D.H. Lawrence
  • Continue to Church Row — Constable's grave at St John-at-Hampstead
  • Walk south via Flask Walk to Heath Street
  • Head to Maresfield Gardens for the Freud Museum
  • End at the Vale of Health — Leigh Hunt, D.H. Lawrence, Tagore

The full circuit takes about three hours at a comfortable walking pace, including visits to Keats House and the Freud Museum.

The Living Tradition

Hampstead continues to attract writers, artists and intellectuals, though the economics of the twenty-first century have made it harder to be a struggling artist here than it was in Keats's time. The poet and novelist Beryl Bainbridge lived in Hampstead for decades. The thriller writer P.D. James was a resident. The area around Flask Walk and Holly Hill retains a concentration of people who work in the arts, publishing and academia that is unusual even by London standards. The bookshops, the talks at the Freud Museum and Burgh House, the literary events at the Everyman cinema — the intellectual life that drew Keats and Constable here persists, in a different form, today.