A hilltop spa village grew into London's most famous address for writers
Hampstead started as an Anglo-Saxon homestead, became a fashionable spa where Londoners took iron-rich waters, and turned into a magnet for thinkers and artists. Sigmund Freud, George Orwell, Agatha Christie and T. S. Eliot all lived there, and it once counted more prime ministers and millionaires than anywhere else in Britain.
People have used the hill for a very long time. Flint tools and burnt stones on the Heath point to hunter-gatherers around 7000 BCE, and burial urns near Well Walk from 70 to 120 CE hint at Roman activity. The name joins the Old English ham and stede, the same roots as homestead. King Ethelred the Unready granted land there to Westminster's monastery in 986, and the Domesday Book of 1086 recorded it.
Its fortunes rose in the seventeenth century as wealthy Londoners sought an escape from the city. From 1700 trustees promoted the local chalybeate springs, with a pump room and assembly room on Well Walk and elegant houses on Church Row. Rival spas eventually drew the crowds away, and the pump room was torn down in 1882. Railways brought the next boom: the North London line in the 1860s, then in 1907 the tube line whose Hampstead station is still the deepest on the Underground.
The area kept its cultured reputation. Visitors can tour the Freud Museum, Keats House, Kenwood House and Fenton House, and the Isokon building on Lawn Road, a Grade I listed experiment in shared living, housed Agatha Christie, Henry Moore and Walter Gropius. George Martin's AIR studios work from a converted church. A Daily Telegraph columnist in the 1960s mocked Hampstead Liberalism through Mrs Dutt-Pauker, a fabulously rich socialist aristocrat.
Hampstead Heath, London's largest ancient parkland, has three swimming ponds, for men, for women and for mixed bathing, once reservoirs feeding the River Fleet, and a protected skyline view from Parliament Hill. On 14 August 1975 the area set a UK record with 169 millimetres of rain in 155 minutes. By 2018 a home there averaged £1.5 million.
Source: Hampstead
