The Vale of Health is, by most reckonings, the most improbable address in London. A small hamlet of perhaps 30 houses, enclosed entirely within the Heath, it is accessible only via a single road that most people drive past without noticing — and inside it, the city simply does not exist. You can stand in the Vale of Health on a November morning and hear nothing but water and birds.
The History
The Vale was drained in the early 19th century from what had previously been a malarial marsh — hence, with the optimistic nominalism that characterises English place naming, its current name. It was quickly colonised by artists and writers who found in its combination of complete seclusion and proximity to the village exactly the conditions they needed.
The Residents
Leigh Hunt — poet, essayist, and friend of Keats and Shelley — lived in the Vale and used it as a kind of literary salon in the 1810s and 1820s. D.H. Lawrence and Frieda came in 1915, briefly and unhappily — Lawrence found London uncongenial in general and the Vale's particular brand of bohemianism insufficiently serious. Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, visited Hunt and stayed long enough to begin a correspondence with Keats's ghost that runs through some of his later English writing.
The Vale Today
The Vale today is residential and private in a way that makes exploration somewhat awkward — there is no public access beyond the single road that passes through it. But walking the perimeter path in late afternoon, looking down at the handful of houses in their bowl of green, it is possible to understand why people came here and, for the most part, did not leave.
## The geography of a hidden village The Vale of Health is a tight cluster of around fifty cottages tucked inside Hampstead Heath, accessible only by a single narrow lane off East Heath Road. Unless you know it exists, you can walk the Heath a hundred times and never see it. The lane descends steeply between two high walls, opens into a small triangular green, and the cottages cluster around it. The land was originally a mosquito-ridden swamp called Hatches Bottom, notorious in the early eighteenth century for outbreaks of fever. In 1777 the Hampstead Water Company drained the area and a young cloth merchant named Samuel Hoare cleared the ground and built a small cluster of brick cottages. The name Vale of Health was adopted sometime around 1800 — a piece of speculative marketing, since the fever association was still recent. ## The cottages and who lived in them Most of the current building stock dates from between 1820 and 1870, with a handful of earlier Georgian survivors and a few Edwardian infill houses. The cottages are genuine workers' housing that became fashionable — a pattern repeated across Hampstead — and are now among the most expensive small houses in north London. A two-bedroom Vale of Health cottage sells for between £1.5m and £2.8m depending on condition and view. Leigh Hunt lived at number 1 from 1815, and Keats visited him there repeatedly; some Keats biographers argue that the conversations with Hunt in the Vale of Health produced the first drafts of Ode to a Nightingale. Rabindranath Tagore stayed at number 3 in 1912, during the year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. D. H. Lawrence and Frieda lived briefly in 1915, in a cottage on the southern edge — Lawrence used the Vale as the setting for scenes in Kangaroo and described it as 'a small valley, a bit of jungle, dropped into the Heath'. Compton Mackenzie, the novelist, lived in the Vale in the 1920s. Edgar Wallace, writing thrillers at industrial pace, took a cottage here in 1926. ## The pub that used to be The Vale of Health had its own pub, the Vale of Health Tavern, from around 1800 to 1960 — a classic small working-class pub for Heath gardeners and Highgate builders. It was demolished in the early 1960s and the site redeveloped as a private house. The only surviving public building is the old Vale of Health Chapel on the east side, now converted to a private residence. ## Visiting The Vale is open to walkers — there is no gate or restriction — but everything inside it is private residential. Please be respectful. The lane is narrow and there is no parking. Walk in from East Heath Road; the entrance is opposite the top of Gayton Road and is signed only by a small white post. The small green at the centre is a good place to sit for ten minutes. The funfair that used to hold Easter and Whitsun fairs on the Vale pond closed permanently in 2019; the pond is still there, thick with waterlilies from May, and hosts a small population of terrapins abandoned by pet owners in the 1990s.