Bohemian Paradise

From John Keats to Dame Judi Dench–Hampstead has long been the home of Britain’s best, with good reason, discovers Carla Passino

- Carla Passino

IT’S hard to keep up with Hampstead and not only because the climb up the hill is challenging on the legs. Every cottage-lined lane, every vine-festooned street reads like a Who’s Who of the past two centuries, with so many blue plaques that your head has to swivel fast from side to side to take them all in.

Surprisingly, the village stayed out of the limelight for centuries, a haven for people who found it hard to settle elsewhere—Quakers or Protestant Dissenters. Interest in the area only picked up in the 18th century, when the healing properties of its iron-rich waters, ‘being equal in virtue with Tunbridge Wells’, as noted in a newspaper of the time, turned Hampstead into a spa town. It never became as fashionable as Bath because ‘it was a little too seedy,’ points out Mark Francis of local-history museum Burgh House.

Nonetheless, the lure of the waters provided brisk enough business to make Hampstead a favourite with highwaymen (including, according to local lore, Dick Turpin himself) and to enrich the spa’s chief doctor, William Gibbons, who, in 1720, bought a pretty Queen Anne property—Burgh House.

From its panoramic spot in New End Square, the Grade I-listed building has witnessed first hand Hampstead’s rise to its position as one of London's most sought-after neighbourhoods. Today, the house is a local institution, at whose cafe you may spot Emma Thompson or Helena Bonham Carter.