Somehow I thought Hampstead would be a great distance from the center of London, but it turns out to be only an eleven-minute ride on the Northern Line from the underground station King’s Cross St. Pancras, with stops at Euston, Camden Town, Chalk Farm and Belsize Park. By this time Read More …
Hampstead is a former village (once a fashionable spa) which is now an affluent district of London. It used to be known for its intellectuals, artists and writers such as George Orwell, who lived there in the 1930s and wrote about it in his early novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying Read More …
The Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) lived in this house at 10 Keats Grove, Hampstead, for seventeen months from 1818 to 1820. From here he travelled to Rome, where he died of tuberculosis at age 25. The sign by the plum tree explains: “Keats wrote his famous ‘Ode to a Read More …
On our VirtualTourist walking tour of Hampstead, we went through a street called Back Lane, where we came across this house (at 1 Back Lane) with an 18th century “Assurance” plaque on its brick façade. Sarah explained that in those days each insurance company had its own fire brigade. Before Read More …
This protrusion at the north end of Hampstead Heath used to be the highest point in London, at a dizzying height of 137 metres (449 feet) above sea level. It was, in fact, the highest point in the former County of London, which existed from 1889 to 1965. But the Read More …
Although I arrived in London on a Thursday, I soon decided not to try out the Santander Cycles until Sunday, in hopes that the traffic would then be somewhat less ferocious. Also I was a bit nervous about riding on the left side of the street, which I hadn’t done Read More …
Floral Street might at first look like an ordinary London street, with older brick buildings on one side and a newer stone building on the other, until you look up and notice that two of the buildings are joined by an unusual construction that stretches across the street like a Read More …
By a strange irony of history, hundreds of thousands of refugees from war-torn countries have tried desperately, in recent years, to get into Germany. This is a huge change from the 1930s, when people were trying just as desperately to escape from Germany, where the Nazis were in power and Read More …