Keats, Shelley, Orwell, du Maurier — Hampstead has been home to more writers per square mile than almost anywhere in England. Here is their story.
Walk along any street in Hampstead and you are never far from a blue plaque. The neighbourhood has been home to an extraordinary concentration of writers, artists, and thinkers — a tradition that stretches from the Romantic poets of the early 19th century to the novelists of the present day.
John Keats
Keats arrived in Hampstead in 1817, renting rooms at what is now Keats House on Keats Grove. He was 22 years old, already consumptive, and in the two years before his death he wrote some of the greatest lyric poetry in the English language. The house is now a museum; the garden where he composed the Ode to a Nightingale is open to visitors.
George Orwell
Orwell lived briefly on Parliament Hill in the 1930s, working at a bookshop in Hampstead High Street while writing Keep the Aspidistra Flying. The experience of selling books while nursing ambitions as a novelist fed directly into the novel's bitter comedy.
Daphne du Maurier
Du Maurier spent her childhood in Hampstead, at Cannon Hall on Well Road. Her father Gerald was a celebrated actor-manager; her childhood home was filled with theatre people and writers. The atmosphere of genteel bohemia she absorbed in those years would surface repeatedly in her fiction.
The Tradition Continues
The tradition has not stopped. Hampstead remains home to working writers, many of whom cite the Heath, the relative quiet, and the persistent sense of being slightly outside the city as essential conditions for their work. The literary ghosts, it seems, are good company.
## Where to find the literary ghosts if you want to walk them
Start at Keats House on Keats Grove. Keats lived here 1818 to 1820, fell in love with Fanny Brawne (who lived in the other half of the same house), and wrote Ode to a Nightingale in the garden — reputedly after a nightingale sang from the plum tree. The house is Wednesday to Sunday, 11am to 5pm, around £8 adults, free for under-18s. Ten minutes inside is enough to see the small bed where Keats first coughed blood, diagnosing himself a doctor's son, immediately and correctly, with tuberculosis that would kill him eight months later in Rome.
Five minutes' walk north, at 1 Willow Road, is the Erno Goldfinger-designed modernist house where the architect lived from 1939. Not a literary site, but Ian Fleming borrowed Goldfinger's surname after losing a planning fight against him — a detail most literary-pilgrimage guides skip.
Back through the village, at 40 Well Walk, John Constable spent his widowed later years, painting the Heath skies from the upstairs window (now a private flat; a plaque). Constable is buried in St John-at-Hampstead churchyard at the top of Church Row, a two-minute walk.
Head south-east down Christchurch Hill to Downshire Hill. At number 47, Mark Gertler — the East End painter, not strictly a literary figure but at the centre of Hampstead's 1920s literary set — hosted parties that drew Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Dora Carrington, and Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield lived intermittently at East Heath Lodge on East Heath Road with John Middleton Murry in 1918 to 1919.
## George Orwell in the bookshop years
Orwell's Hampstead is not the Orwell of literary memorials — no plaque, no house museum — but it is easily the most documented. Between 1934 and 1935 he worked part-time at Booklovers' Corner on the corner of South End Road and Pond Street. The shop is gone (it is now a chain cafe, ironically), but the building is the same. His experiences there became Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). He lived in a flat above the shop, walked the Heath at dawn before opening, and drank at the Magdala further down the road — the pub where, in 1955, Ruth Ellis shot her lover, becoming the last woman hanged in Britain.
## H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and the Vale of Health
The Vale of Health — a tiny pocket of cottages tucked inside the Heath — housed Rabindranath Tagore in 1912 (during his Nobel-winning year) and D. H. Lawrence briefly in 1915. H. G. Wells's first wife lived at 17 Church Row. Aldous Huxley grew up at 16 Bracknell Gardens, closer to Swiss Cottage but then considered part of greater Hampstead.
## The pilgrim's tip
Do this walk in winter. The plaques photograph better without the tree cover, and the village is almost empty from November to February — which is, after all, the mood most of the writers on the plaques were in when they lived here.
