George Orwell in Hampstead: The Bookshop Years

Before Animal Farm and 1984 Orwell worked in a secondhand bookshop in Hampstead and drew on the experience for his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

Between October 1934 and January 1936, Eric Arthur Blair — not yet famous enough as George Orwell to give up the day job — worked part-time at Booklovers' Corner, a second-hand bookshop on the corner of South End Road and South End Green in Hampstead. The shop allowed Blair a room upstairs in exchange for working the afternoon shift; he used the mornings to write.

What the job produced

The experience fed directly into Keep the Aspidistra Flying, published in 1936, whose protagonist Gordon Comstock works in a bookshop and nurses a comprehensive resentment of money and success. The bookshop scenes have the texture of direct observation — the particular smell of old paperbacks, the customers who use the shop as a library and never buy anything, the arithmetic of a low salary that never quite adds up. Orwell's essay "Bookshop Memories," written shortly after he left, is the more direct record of the same period.

The building today

The building on South End Road still stands, though it is no longer a bookshop. A blue plaque marks Orwell's residence, and the shopfront has been tactfully preserved; the general lines of the place he described are visible from across the road. It is the kind of literary site that rewards slow looking rather than photographs.

Orwell's Hampstead life

Orwell was not a natural Hampsteadite. He was poor, he was tubercular, and he had little patience for the donnish conversation that dominated the literary salons of the period. But he used the Heath constantly — it appears in his journals and letters throughout the 1934–36 period — and the village gave him a cheap room in a location that put him within reach of the publishers and magazines he was beginning to write for. The ten minutes' walk from South End Green to the Heath is one of the shortest urban-to-green transitions in London.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying as a Hampstead novel

The novel is not exclusively set in Hampstead — the action moves across several north London neighbourhoods — but the bookshop scenes are recognisably local, and the wider geography of the book assumes the same walking-distance London that Hampstead residents still inhabit. For literary context, see our literary ghosts of Hampstead.

Other writers in the same years

The mid-1930s were a busy literary moment in NW3. Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis and Stevie Smith all had Hampstead presences in these years; the Isokon Building on Lawn Road was attracting a very different sort of refugee literary circle, about which we say more in our architectural guide. The blue-plaque trail runs directly past the Orwell building.

A short walking tour

Begin at the Orwell plaque on South End Road, walk north up to the Heath at South End Green, climb Parliament Hill for the view, and descend into the village for lunch — the standard half-day literary walk. For suggestions on where to eat afterwards, see our pubs guide.

## The bookshop years in detail George Orwell worked part-time at Booklovers' Corner on the corner of South End Road and Pond Street between October 1934 and January 1936. He was paid roughly 30 shillings a week — adequate but not generous — and lived in the small flat above the shop, owned by the Westrope family who ran the business. The combination of low rent, regular hours, and the steady traffic of book buyers gave Orwell the financial space and observational material that fed his early novels. The shop was a genuine secondhand-and-new bookseller of the period — a small commercial trade that has almost entirely disappeared from the modern High Street. Orwell's customers ranged from regular middle-class Hampstead readers to the more eccentric end of the literary scene; his essays from this period contain several barbed character sketches of recognisable types from the shop's clientele. ## Keep the Aspidistra Flying Orwell completed Keep the Aspidistra Flying (published 1936) during his Hampstead residency. The novel's protagonist Gordon Comstock — a failed poet working in a dingy bookshop — is a thinly fictionalised version of Orwell's own situation, with the autobiographical content acknowledged in the novel's preface to later editions. The shop in the book is recognisably Booklovers' Corner. The novel was not commercially successful at the time and Orwell came to dislike it; he asked his publishers to allow it to go out of print. It returned to wider circulation only after Orwell's death and is now read as one of the more revealing accounts of low-paid intellectual life in 1930s Britain. ## The Hampstead literary network Orwell met his future wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy at a Hampstead party in 1935; she was a student at University College London, training as a psychologist. They married in 1936 and moved to a cottage in Wallington, Hertfordshire, ending Orwell's Hampstead residency. Other regulars at Hampstead literary parties of this period included the poet Stephen Spender, the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, and the publisher Victor Gollancz, who would publish much of Orwell's mature work. ## What survives The Booklovers' Corner building on South End Road still stands; the ground floor is now a chain café (the irony is occasionally noted). No formal English Heritage blue plaque marks Orwell's residency — he failed the heritage body's two-decade rule when proposed in the 1980s. A small unofficial plaque was installed by the Hampstead Heritage Trust in 2003 above the shop entrance. Orwell's regular Hampstead pub was the Magdala on South Hill Park, a five-minute walk from the shop. The Magdala — closed for a decade — reopened in 2021 with a proper kitchen and a bar that retains some of its 1930s character. A photograph of Orwell hangs on the back-bar wall. ## Walking the Orwell Hampstead A short Orwell-trail walk: Hampstead Heath overground (where he often started his morning Heath walks), up through the Heath to Parliament Hill (he wrote of the view in several letters), down to South End Road (Booklovers' Corner site), continue down to the Magdala for a pint. About 90 minutes including a stop.