More writers, poets and novelists have lived in Hampstead than almost anywhere else in England. A guide to the literary history of the village and heath.
He also wrote The Eve of St Agnes and much of Hyperion here. The house is now a museum, small and quietly curated, with original manuscripts on display.
He left Hampstead in 1820 for Italy, where he died the following year aged 25.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1823-1834)
Coleridge spent the last years of his life at Moreton House on The Grove, living with his friend Dr James Gillman. By this point the opium addiction was under control and he was at his most sociable, his Sunday afternoon conversations at the house became famous, attended by Carlyle, Mill, Emerson and others.
He died in Highgate in 1834 but is buried at St Michael's Church there, just over the border from Hampstead.
D.H. Lawrence (1915-1916)
Lawrence and Frieda lived briefly at 1 Byron Villas on Vale of Health, arriving just as The Rainbow was about to be seized by police for obscenity. He hated London and found Hampstead too respectable, but the Heath gave him material and the period is well documented in his letters. He left for Cornwall in 1916.
George Orwell
Orwell worked in the Hampstead branch of Booklover's Corner (a second-hand bookshop on South End Road, now gone) in 1934-35, an experience that fed directly into Keep the Aspidistra Flying. He lodged above a shop on Parliament Hill and walked the Heath regularly. The area appears, thinly disguised, in the novel.
A Literary Walk
Starting at Hampstead tube, walk up Flask Walk to Well Walk (where Constable lived at No. 40), continue to Keats Grove and visit Keats House, then cut up through the Heath to Parliament Hill (where Orwell walked), across to the Vale of Health (Lawrence's address), and finish at The Spaniards Inn, mentioned by Dickens in The Pickwick Papers and used by Bram Stoker as a location in Dracula.
The Isokon Building and Agatha Christie
One of the most remarkable literary addresses in Hampstead is the Isokon building, the Lawn Road Flats, a startling white Modernist block completed in 1934 and now a Grade I-listed icon of British design.
Conceived as an experiment in communal urban living, it attracted an extraordinary roster of residents. Agatha Christie lived here through the war years and wrote several novels in the flats;
her fellow tenants included the Bauhaus émigrés Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and, as later emerged, a cell of Soviet agents.
A small gallery on the ground floor tells the building's story.
It is a ten-minute walk from the village and an essential stop for anyone interested in the cross-currents of literature, design and history in twentieth-century Hampstead.
Katherine Mansfield and the Modernists
The short-story writer Katherine Mansfield and her husband, the critic John Middleton Murry, lived at Portland Villas on East Heath Road during 1918-1919, a house they nicknamed "The Elephant." Their circle included Virginia Woolf and D.H.
Lawrence, and the Heath threads through Mansfield's letters of the period. Hampstead's appeal to the Bloomsbury and modernist worlds was considerable, close enough to literary London, far enough to think.
Robert Louis Stevenson and the Victorians
Robert Louis Stevenson spent part of his childhood at Mount Vernon, and the steep lanes and fogbound corners of the village are often cited among the atmospheric influences on his later fiction.
Hampstead's Victorian literary residents were numerous, and the blue plaques scheme records dozens more, our guide to Hampstead's famous residents and blue plaques maps the fuller picture.
The Bookshops
A literary village needs bookshops, and Hampstead still has good ones. Daunt Books on the South End Green side keeps the tradition of the thoughtful independent alive, while Keith Fawkes on Flask Walk is a gloriously cluttered second-hand shop of the old school, exactly the kind of place George Orwell described from the inside in Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
An afternoon browsing them is itself a form of literary tourism.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which writers lived in Hampstead?
Among many others: John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, George Orwell, Robert Louis Stevenson and Agatha Christie, who wrote in the Isokon flats on Lawn Road during the war.
Can you visit Keats House?
Yes, Keats House on Keats Grove is a museum, open most of the year, with original manuscripts and the garden where he wrote Ode to a Nightingale.
Is there a literary walk in Hampstead?
Yes, a natural route links Flask Walk, Well Walk (Constable's home), Keats Grove, Parliament Hill (Orwell's walking ground), the Vale of Health (Lawrence) and the Spaniards Inn (Dickens and Stoker). Allow a half-day with museum stops.
The Isokon Building and Agatha Christie
One of the most remarkable literary addresses in Hampstead is the Isokon building, the Lawn Road Flats, a startling white Modernist block completed in 1934 and now a Grade I-listed icon of British design.
Conceived as an experiment in communal urban living, it attracted an extraordinary roster of residents. Agatha Christie lived here through the war years and wrote several novels in the flats;
her fellow tenants included the Bauhaus émigrés Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and, as later emerged, a cell of Soviet agents.
A small gallery on the ground floor tells the building's story. It is a ten-minute walk from the village and an essential stop for anyone interested in the cross-currents of literature, design and history in twentieth-century Hampstead.
Katherine Mansfield and the Modernists
The short-story writer Katherine Mansfield and her husband, the critic John Middleton Murry, lived at Portland Villas on East Heath Road during 1918-1919, a house they nicknamed "The Elephant." Their circle included Virginia Woolf and D.H.
Lawrence, and the Heath threads through Mansfield's letters of the period. Hampstead's appeal to the Bloomsbury and modernist worlds was considerable, close enough to literary London, far enough to think.
Robert Louis Stevenson and the Victorians
Robert Louis Stevenson spent part of his childhood at Mount Vernon, and the steep lanes and fogbound corners of the village are often cited among the atmospheric influences on his later fiction.
Hampstead's Victorian literary residents were numerous, and the blue plaques scheme records dozens more, our guide to Hampstead's famous residents and blue plaques maps the fuller picture.
The Bookshops
A literary village needs bookshops, and Hampstead still has good ones. Daunt Books on the South End Green side keeps the tradition of the thoughtful independent alive, while Keith Fawkes on Flask Walk is a gloriously cluttered second-hand shop of the old school, exactly the kind of place George Orwell described from the inside in Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
An afternoon browsing them is itself a form of literary tourism.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which writers lived in Hampstead?
Among many others: John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, George Orwell, Robert Louis Stevenson and Agatha Christie, who wrote in the Isokon flats on Lawn Road during the war.
Can you visit Keats House?
Yes, Keats House on Keats Grove is a museum, open most of the year, with original manuscripts and the garden where he wrote Ode to a Nightingale.
Is there a literary walk in Hampstead?
Yes, a natural route links Flask Walk, Well Walk (Constable's home), Keats Grove, Parliament Hill (Orwell's walking ground), the Vale of Health (Lawrence) and the Spaniards Inn (Dickens and Stoker). Allow a half-day with museum stops.
The Isokon Building and Agatha Christie
One of the most remarkable literary addresses in Hampstead is the Isokon building, the Lawn Road Flats, a startling white Modernist block completed in 1934 and now a Grade I-listed icon of British design. Conceived as an experiment in communal urban living, it attracted an extraordinary roster of residents. Agatha Christie lived here through the war years and wrote several novels in the flats;
her fellow tenants included the Bauhaus émigrés Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and, as later emerged, a cell of Soviet agents.
A small gallery on the ground floor tells the building's story. It is a ten-minute walk from the village and an essential stop for anyone interested in the cross-currents of literature, design and history in twentieth-century Hampstead.
Katherine Mansfield and the Modernists
The short-story writer Katherine Mansfield and her husband, the critic John Middleton Murry, lived at Portland Villas on East Heath Road during 1918-1919, a house they nicknamed "The Elephant." Their circle included Virginia Woolf and D.H.
Lawrence, and the Heath threads through Mansfield's letters of the period. Hampstead's appeal to the Bloomsbury and modernist worlds was considerable, close enough to literary London, far enough to think.
Robert Louis Stevenson and the Victorians
Robert Louis Stevenson spent part of his childhood at Mount Vernon, and the steep lanes and fogbound corners of the village are often cited among the atmospheric influences on his later fiction.
Hampstead's Victorian literary residents were numerous, and the blue plaques scheme records dozens more, our guide to Hampstead's famous residents and blue plaques maps the fuller picture.
The Bookshops
A literary village needs bookshops, and Hampstead still has good ones. Daunt Books on the South End Green side keeps the tradition of the thoughtful independent alive, while Keith Fawkes on Flask Walk is a gloriously cluttered second-hand shop of the old school, exactly the kind of place George Orwell described from the inside in Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
An afternoon browsing them is itself a form of literary tourism.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which writers lived in Hampstead?
Among many others: John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, George Orwell, Robert Louis Stevenson and Agatha Christie, who wrote in the Isokon flats on Lawn Road during the war.
Can you visit Keats House?
Yes, Keats House on Keats Grove is a museum, open most of the year, with original manuscripts and the garden where he wrote Ode to a Nightingale.
Is there a literary walk in Hampstead?
Yes, a natural route links Flask Walk, Well Walk (Constable's home), Keats Grove, Parliament Hill (Orwell's walking ground), the Vale of Health (Lawrence) and the Spaniards Inn (Dickens and Stoker). Allow a half-day with museum stops.
The Isokon Building and Agatha Christie
One of the most remarkable literary addresses in Hampstead is the Isokon building, the Lawn Road Flats, a startling white Modernist block completed in 1934 and now a Grade I-listed icon of British design. Conceived as an experiment in communal urban living, it attracted an extraordinary roster of residents. Agatha Christie lived here through the war years and wrote several novels in the flats; her fellow tenants included the Bauhaus émigrés Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and, as later emerged, a cell of Soviet agents.
A small gallery on the ground floor tells the building's story. It is a ten-minute walk from the village and an essential stop for anyone interested in the cross-currents of literature, design and history in twentieth-century Hampstead.
Katherine Mansfield and the Modernists
The short-story writer Katherine Mansfield and her husband, the critic John Middleton Murry, lived at Portland Villas on East Heath Road during 1918-1919, a house they nicknamed "The Elephant." Their circle included Virginia Woolf and D.H.
Lawrence, and the Heath threads through Mansfield's letters of the period. Hampstead's appeal to the Bloomsbury and modernist worlds was considerable, close enough to literary London, far enough to think.
Robert Louis Stevenson and the Victorians
Robert Louis Stevenson spent part of his childhood at Mount Vernon, and the steep lanes and fogbound corners of the village are often cited among the atmospheric influences on his later fiction.
Hampstead's Victorian literary residents were numerous, and the blue plaques scheme records dozens more, our guide to Hampstead's famous residents and blue plaques maps the fuller picture.
The Bookshops
A literary village needs bookshops, and Hampstead still has good ones. Daunt Books on the South End Green side keeps the tradition of the thoughtful independent alive, while Keith Fawkes on Flask Walk is a gloriously cluttered second-hand shop of the old school, exactly the kind of place George Orwell described from the inside in Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
An afternoon browsing them is itself a form of literary tourism.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which writers lived in Hampstead?
Among many others: John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, George Orwell, Robert Louis Stevenson and Agatha Christie, who wrote in the Isokon flats on Lawn Road during the war.
Can you visit Keats House?
Yes, Keats House on Keats Grove is a museum, open most of the year, with original manuscripts and the garden where he wrote Ode to a Nightingale.
Is there a literary walk in Hampstead?
Yes, a natural route links Flask Walk, Well Walk (Constable's home), Keats Grove, Parliament Hill (Orwell's walking ground), the Vale of Health (Lawrence) and the Spaniards Inn (Dickens and Stoker). Allow a half-day with museum stops.
