The Literary Ghosts of Hampstead: Writers Who Shaped the Village

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.