The Vale of Health: Hampstead's Most Secluded Corner

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.