How to spend a day in Hampstead
Hampstead‘s links with creative thinkers across geographies and centuries make this inner London neighbourhood an ideal destination for a day of culture.
A version of this article first appeared in the autumn 2024 issue of Art Quarterly, the membership magazine of Art Fund.
September 2024 marked the 85th anniversary of the death of Sigmund Freud, who died in 1939 at the redbrick villa that is now the Freud Museum in Hampstead. The father of psychoanalysis is just one of the many artists, writers and academics connected to this part of northwest London. More than 75 commemorative plaques adorn Hampstead’s streets, and its museums, galleries and historic houses cater to all interests.
Contemporary artists are nurtured by Camden Art Centre, housed in the former Hampstead Central Library, opposite Finchley Road and Frognal station. Jesse Darling, winner of the Turner Prize 2023, was a recipient of the Centre’s Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellowship.
Until 29 December Jack O’Brien, winner of the Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Prize, is displaying a site-specific installation of work incorporating his signature use of wrapping objects in polythene. A solo exhibition of the late feminist Pop artist Nicola L is on until the same date.
About a 10-minute walk away is the Freud Museum itself. The dining room and conservatory, where Freud, his wife, Martha, and children gathered, hosts Freud’s daughter and pioneering child therapist Anna Freud’s painted Jugendstil furniture. Across the hall, the study contains Freud’s famous couch, covered with Oriental rugs, and plain, folded cover at the end, as if ready for the next analysand.
A display detailing the terrible fate of Freud’s four youngest sisters during the Second World War, in the Theresienstadt ghetto and Treblinka, emphasises the dangers refugees such as the Freuds were fleeing. A special exhibition exploring the role women played in the invention of psychoanalysis, Women & Freud: Patients, Pioneers and Artists, is open until 5 May 2025.
Houses on the Heath
A further 20-minute walk towards Hampstead Heath leads to Keats House, former home of poet John Keats (1795-1821). He lived there for just 17 months but during that time wrote his famous poem Ode to a Nightingale, declaring ‘tender is the night’, and fell in love with neighbour Fanny Brawne.
Keats House recreates the poet’s domestic life, lodging with his landlord and friend, playwright Charles Brown, and with close neighbours the Dilkes, then the Brawnes, when the Regency building was originally two homes, rather than one.
Displayed surgical equipment illustrates Keats’ abandoned profession as surgeon apothecary. A faded green couch facing the garden, with cushions instructing ‘sit here’, gives the sense of the poet’s last consumptive months, before dying in Rome in February 1821 aged only 25. Portraits of Keats, painted from memory by artist and friend Joseph Severn, Keats’ sickbed companion, include the 1845 work, Keats Listening to the Nightingale on Hampstead Heath. In Keats’ parlour a soundtrack of nib on paper and chinking teacups evokes the poet at work.
Downstairs, the kitchen, with original dresser, offers period clothes to try on. In Fanny Brawne’s bedroom is the garnet and gold scrollwork secret engagement ring given by Keats. A basket of bonnets and cravats, with instructions on how to tie a Mail Coach cravat, provide the opportunity to trial a Regency look.
Five minutes away, on the edge of West Heath is 2 Willow Road. Settling in London in 1934, Modernist architect Ernö Goldfinger followed the dictum of his profession to build his own family home, completing this terrace of three houses five years later. Goldfinger used slab floors on a steel and concrete frame to create an open-plan interior, without load-bearing walls. The architect hoped his friend Surrealist Roland Penrose would buy No 3, but Penrose said it had ‘too many windows’, and bought a Georgian town house instead.
A spiral staircase, made by Goldfinger’s friend Ove Arup, is accessible from every room. The south-facing living room with parquet floor, fireplace and dimmable lamps has a softer feel than the dining room with practical rubberised floor. In here hangs Bridget Riley’s 1962 painting Fugitive. The living room contains Max Ernst’s painted stone Pebble (1934) and two early works by Henry Moore: the sculpture Head (1938), and a drawing. Goldfinger bought the Moore works for £50. Every room has inbuilt storage, enabling only art and aesthetic objects to be left on display.
In the heart of Hampstead
A little further west, at the heart of Hampstead, is the Queen Anne, Grade I listed Burgh House. Built in 1704, it fell into disrepair in the 20th century and was saved from developers by and for the community in 1979, with actress Judi Dench among those who made donations.
Now including a pretty sunken courtyard café, Burgh House tells the history of Hampstead and those associated with it. Two current exhibitions pair portraits of women by Marie-Louise von Motesiczky with images of women by photographer Dorothy Bohm (both to 15 December).
On the northern side of the Heath, a route past ponds and woods leads to Kenwood House. Between 1764 and 1779, 1st Earl of Mansfield, William Murray, had Robert Adam remodel the 17th-century building into a porticoed neoclassical villa, with some of the architect’s finest interiors. In the 1790s meandering paths and groves of trees were landscaped by Humphry Repton.
Kenwood’s many important Old Masters, including Vermeer’s The Guitar Player (1672), Rembrandt’s Portrait of the Artist (with Circles) (1665-68), Frans Hals’ Pieter van den Broecke (1633), and Thomas Gainsborough’s Mary, Countess of Howe (c1764), were part of the Iveagh Bequest of 1929, which saved Kenwood and its grounds for the nation.
Visitors aged five to 11 can follow the pawprints of Mac’s Trail to discover Kenwood’s many stories.
Beyond art in Hampstead
Eat
Louis Patisserie and pubs the Spaniards Inn, Old Bull & Bush and Flask are institutions. Alternatives include cafés Roni’s and Ginger & White. For picnics, try Hampstead Butcher & Providore and Da Cheffone Italian Delicatessen, or simply enjoy a crêpe from La Crêperie de Hampstead.
Shop
French fashion chains Bompard, Balibaris, Zadig & Voltaire and Maje line Rosslyn Hill and Hampstead High Street. Flask Walk has antiques store and antiquarian bookseller Keith Fawkes, a florist and a bakery. Maud and Mabel in Perrins Court sells contemporary ceramics.
Relax
St John’s churchyard with John Constable’s grave has great views. Golders Hill Park Zoo is popular with families, as is Parliament Hill Lido and Adventure Playground. And the Heath has three bathing ponds. For indoor days there is The Everyman Hampstead cinema.
The more you see, the more we do.
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