Hampstead has sheltered writers for centuries — drawn by the air, the Heath, the distance from the noise of the city, and the company of other writers. The roll call is extraordinary: Keats, Coleridge, Shelley, D.H. Lawrence, H.G. Wells, Daphne du Maurier, George Orwell. Walking the village streets is a form of literary pilgrimage.
John Keats (1818–1820)
The most significant literary address in Hampstead is Keats House on Keats Grove, where the poet lived for two years in his early twenties. It was here, in the garden beneath a plum tree, that he heard a nightingale singing and wrote Ode to a Nightingale in a single morning. 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.