Hampstead has long attracted the creative, the intellectual, and the financially independent. Over four centuries, this attraction has left a physical legacy that is almost without parallel in London — a concentration of significant historic houses, each one a window onto a particular moment in British cultural and social history. From the merchant wealth of the late seventeenth century to the Bauhaus-influenced modernism of the 1930s, the streets of NW3 contain more listed buildings per square mile than almost anywhere outside the historic city centre. This guide introduces the most significant houses, their stories, and how to visit them.
Fenton House — 1693
Standing at the top of Hampstead Grove, Fenton House is the oldest surviving house in Hampstead and one of the finest William and Mary period houses anywhere in England. Built in 1693 — probably for a merchant involved in Baltic trade, though the original owner remains uncertain — the house is constructed of warm red brick with Dutch-influenced details: a deep cornice, tall sash windows, and a hipped roof behind a parapet. It is solid, dignified, and deliberately unpretentious, in the manner of a prosperous professional man rather than a landed aristocrat.
The house takes its current name from Philip Fenton, a Baltic merchant who purchased it in 1793 and whose family held it for several decades. It came to the National Trust in 1952 through a bequest by the last private owner, Lady Binning, along with its remarkable contents: a collection of early keyboard instruments including a 1612 harpsichord said to have been played by Handel, a fine array of English and Continental ceramics, and a set of needlework pictures.
The walled garden behind the house is one of the great surprises of Hampstead. Entered through a gate beside the house, it descends in terraces from a formal parterre near the house through an orchard of ancient apple trees to a kitchen garden and cutting garden at the lower level. In spring the orchard is spectacular with blossom; in summer the kitchen garden is productive and fragrant. The garden is managed on traditional organic principles. Fenton House is open Wednesday to Sunday from March to October; National Trust members enter free.
Church Row — The Georgian Terrace
Church Row is widely considered the most complete and beautiful Georgian street in North London. Running westward from the High Street to St John-at-Hampstead church, it consists of a continuous terrace of early eighteenth-century houses built between approximately 1710 and 1730. The houses are of varying height and width but share a common palette — brown and red brick, white-painted timber sash windows, iron railings — that creates an extraordinarily harmonious streetscape. The church at the end, with its white rendered tower and churchyard full of ancient trees, provides the perfect termination.
Church Row has been home to some notable residents over the centuries. H.G. Wells lived here, as did George du Maurier, whose novel Trilby (1894) made Hampstead its setting and effectively launched the area as a bohemian destination in the popular imagination. The churchyard contains the graves of John Constable, the painter of Hampstead Heath skies, and of Kay Boyle, the American novelist. Although the houses are all private residences, the street can be walked freely at any time and the church is open for visitors most days.
Burgh House — 1703
Burgh House, on New End Square, was built in 1703 and is among the most handsome Queen Anne houses in London. It has had a varied history: a succession of private owners in the eighteenth century, a period as the residence of the medical officer responsible for Hampstead Wells (the local spa waters that once made the village fashionable), and a twentieth-century chapter that saw it used as a community centre and art venue. It takes its name from Allatson Burgh, a clergyman who lived here in the 1880s.
The house is now managed by the Burgh House Trust and operates as a local museum and arts centre. The ground-floor rooms contain a permanent collection focused on the history of Hampstead, including paintings, prints, maps, and objects relating to the village from the seventeenth century to the present. The Buttery in the basement is a popular cafe. The first floor rooms are used for temporary exhibitions, concerts, and lectures — the programme is varied and often excellent. Admission is free; the cafe charges normal cafe prices. The music room on the first floor, with its original panelling and fireplace, is one of the finest domestic interiors in Hampstead.
Keats House — 1815
In Keats Grove, a quiet street east of the High Street, stands the house where John Keats spent two of the most productive years of his short life. Keats moved here in 1818 at the age of twenty-three, sharing the building — then called Wentworth Place, a pair of semi-detached Regency villas — with his friend Charles Brown. His neighbour in the adjoining house was the Brawne family, whose daughter Fanny became the great love of his life. It was in the garden of this house, sitting under a plum tree on a spring morning in 1819, that Keats composed the Ode to a Nightingale, one of the greatest poems in the English language.
The house has been a museum since 1925 and retains much of its Regency character, with original furniture, Keats manuscripts, and the engagement ring he gave to Fanny Brawne on display. The garden, though smaller than in Keats's day, has been replanted with species he would have known, including a mulberry tree and the plum tree traditionally associated with the composition of the Ode. The house is managed by the City of London and is open Tuesday to Sunday. Guided tours are available; there is a small admission charge. The reading room contains an excellent library for those with a deeper interest in Keats and his circle.
2 Willow Road — Goldfinger's Modernist Masterpiece (1939)
At the north end of Willow Road stands a house that looks, at first glance, almost disconcertingly plain. Three storeys of pale concrete and brick, a continuous band of windows at the upper levels, a flat roof: 2 Willow Road was designed by the Hungarian-born architect Erno Goldfinger and completed in 1939. It was controversial from the moment it was built. The novelist Ian Fleming, who disliked Goldfinger so intensely that he named a Bond villain after him, joined the local campaign to stop its construction. The house replaced a group of Victorian cottages that many residents mourned.
Time has vindicated Goldfinger. 2 Willow Road is now recognised as one of the finest examples of modernist domestic architecture in England, and it is listed Grade II* accordingly. Goldfinger himself lived here from completion until his death in 1987, and the house passed to the National Trust intact — still containing all his furniture, his art collection (including works by Max Ernst, Bridget Riley, and Henry Moore), and his library. It is, in effect, a time capsule of a particular kind of sophisticated European intellectual life transplanted to North London.
The National Trust opens the house for guided tours on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday afternoons from March to October. Visits are by timed entry; book in advance as capacity is very limited. The tours are excellent, conducted by knowledgeable guides who bring the house and its owner vividly to life.
Freud Museum — 20 Maresfield Gardens (1938)
When Sigmund Freud fled Vienna in 1938 following the Nazi annexation of Austria, he brought with him a life's accumulation of books, antiquities, and furniture, including the famous couch from his Vienna consulting room. The house at 20 Maresfield Gardens, which he shared with his daughter Anna until his death in September 1939, became the Freud Museum in 1986. Anna Freud, herself an important psychoanalyst, lived here until 1982; the house has been a museum ever since.
The centrepiece of the museum is Freud's study on the ground floor, preserved exactly as it was during his lifetime. The desk, the bookshelves, the extraordinary collection of Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Chinese antiquities — more than two thousand pieces in total — and above all the couch: covered in a Persian rug and still positioned in the window corner where thousands of patients lay to speak their innermost thoughts. No other study in London is quite so charged with intellectual history.
The upper floors contain displays on Freud's life, his flight from Vienna, and the history of psychoanalysis. Temporary exhibitions explore themes related to the Freud family and to psychoanalytic thought more broadly. The museum is open Wednesday to Sunday; there is an admission charge. It is a short walk from the Finchley Road or Swiss Cottage Tube stations.
Flask Walk and Well Walk — Streets of History
Not all of Hampstead's historic houses can be visited, but they can be admired from the street, and two streets in particular repay careful attention. Flask Walk begins at the High Street and descends north-eastward through a narrow pedestrian alley before opening out into a wider residential street lined with Georgian and early Victorian houses. The name derives from the flasks of spa water sold here in the early eighteenth century, when Hampstead Wells attracted fashionable visitors from London for the cure. Several of the houses date from this period and carry blue plaques recording notable former inhabitants.
Well Walk, running parallel to the north, was literally the street of the wells — the chalybeate spring waters emerged here and were administered in a long-demolished pump room. John Constable lived at number 40 from 1821 to 1826, during which time he painted many of his celebrated cloud studies from the Heath nearby. John Keats also lodged briefly on Well Walk before moving to Wentworth Place. The street today is quiet and largely residential, lined with substantial Victorian houses set back behind gardens. At its eastern end it connects directly to the Heath, with views across to Parliament Hill.
Holly Mount and the Hidden Village
Above the High Street, reached by a series of steep lanes and steps, lies the area known as the Mount — a cluster of small streets including Holly Mount, Mount Vernon, and Prospect Place that represent some of the oldest domestic buildings in Hampstead. Holly Mount itself is remarkable: a tiny square at the top of a steep lane, surrounded by early eighteenth-century cottages that look as though they have barely changed since they were built. The Holly Bush pub occupies one corner and adds to the feeling that time has been suspended here.
These upper streets escaped the Victorian rebuilding that transformed much of the lower village, and as a result they preserve an intimacy and domestic scale that feels closer to a market town than a district of one of the world's great cities. Many of the houses are Grade II listed; a few carry blue plaques. Walking up through these lanes from the High Street, particularly in the early morning before the tourist traffic begins, gives a powerful sense of Hampstead as it must have felt two or three centuries ago — a hilltop village perched above London, looking down on the city but not quite of it.