Hampstead Heath, read aloud

The tape 54:56 of narration

Track order is walking order. The measure shows how long you stand in each place; the last column is the clock position if you play the whole thing straight through. Every numbered stop also has a page of its own, which is the one to send someone who only cares about the ponds.

Bar colour follows the gazetteer: village, high ground, water, house

Track · length · from start

The script Verbatim

What is printed here is exactly what is spoken, which is why the numbers are written as words. Broadcast habit: a reader who says “sixteen ninety two” never has to decide what “1692” sounds like.

Track 01 · Introduction · 1:21

How to use this

Introduction

Play1:21

Hampstead Heath and its village. A walking gazetteer, in twenty-four stops.

This is a single loop that starts and ends outside Hampstead Underground station, on Heath Street. Something over three hours of walking before you stop for anything at all, and unlike almost every other walk in London, this one has hills in it. It goes through the village first, up to the highest ground in inner London, west to a half-ruined Edwardian pergola, north-east along the top to Kenwood, and then down the east side of the Heath past the swimming ponds and home.

Wear shoes you do not mind. Two thirds of this is unpaved, the Heath sits on London clay, and it holds water for days after rain.

Nineteen of the twenty-four stops are free. Three more are free unless you get into the water. Two of them charge at the door.

Every track starts with where you should be standing and ends by telling you where to go next. Pause it whenever you want to look at something properly. Nothing here is a race, and the walking times are honest rather than precise.

Walk on

So. Stand with your back to the station entrance and look up Heath Street. Stop one is the ground under your feet.

Track 02 · Village · 1:36 · Stop page

Hampstead Underground Station

Heath Street

Play1:36

Stop one. Hampstead Underground station, which is the deepest hole in London.

The platforms are fifty-eight and a half metres beneath the pavement you are standing on. A hundred and ninety-two feet, and the deepest of any station on the network. It has never had an escalator and it never will, because the climb is too steep to build one. The lifts are the deepest on the Underground, and the emergency staircase spiralling around them runs to more than three hundred and twenty steps.

The reason is the hill rather than the tunnel. Leslie Green's station opened in nineteen oh seven near the top of a hill of London clay, and the railway underneath had to stay roughly level while the ground above it climbed.

Now the better fact, and you cannot see any of it. Half a mile north of here, under the Heath you are about to walk across, there is a station that never opened. North End, or Bull and Bush. The platforms were dug out and then the housing that was meant to fill them was never built, because Henrietta Barnett bought the land above and made sure it stayed empty. Trains pass through the unlit space every few minutes. In the nineteen fifties it was quietly fitted out as a control room for the tunnel floodgates, in case of nuclear attack.

Free, unless you go down.

Walk on

South down Heath Street, on the right-hand pavement, about two minutes. Church Row opens on your right, and it will stop you where you stand.

Track 03 · Village · 2:33 · Stop page

Church Row and Saint John-at-Hampstead

Church Row

Play2:33

Stop two. Church Row, and the parish church at the end of it.

Walk down the middle of the road and look at both sides at once. This is the oldest complete street in Hampstead, laid out around seventeen twenty, and it is usually called the finest Georgian row in London that is not in a square. What makes it work is the discipline. Same brick, same eaves line, same railings, and no two doorcases quite alike.

At the end is Saint John-at-Hampstead. Look at it before you go in, because the tower is at the east end, where the altar is supposed to be. Nobody has ever fully explained why. When the church needed more room in eighteen seventy eight the architect gave up arguing with the tower and turned the inside round instead, which is why you will walk in and find the altar at the wrong end of the building.

In the churchyard, in the south-east corner, is John Constable, in a chest tomb of Portland stone with his wife Maria. He lived at forty Well Walk, ten minutes from here, and he is buried within sight of the sky he spent the last years of his life painting over and over again. You will end this walk outside his front door.

The extension across the road holds Hugh Gaitskell, who nearly became Prime Minister, the actor Anton Walbrook, and the ashes of Peter Cook.

It also holds the Llewelyn Davies family. Arthur and Sylvia had five sons, and after both parents died young the boys were taken in by a family friend who had been writing stories for them for years. The friend was J M Barrie and the stories became Peter Pan. Being the boy who Peter Pan was based on turned out to be a life sentence rather than a gift, and more than one of them said so. Peter, who got the name, spent his adult life calling the book that terrible masterpiece, and in nineteen sixty he stepped in front of a train at Sloane Square.

Free, and open most days.

Walk on

Out through the top of the churchyard into Holly Walk, the narrow lane climbing north between the walls. Ninety seconds. On your right, set into the terrace and looking like a house that happens to have a bell, is stop three. You will walk past it if you are not counting doors.

Track 04 · Village · 2:00 · Stop page

Saint Mary's, Holly Walk

Holly Place

Play2:00

Stop three. Saint Mary's.

It does not look like a church, and that is the whole point. It was built in eighteen sixteen, when a Catholic church in England was a recent and nervous freedom, and it is one of the earliest built in London after the Reformation. So it keeps its head down. Only the bell tower and the statue of the Virgin and Child give it away, and both of those were added in the eighteen fifties, once it was safe to be obvious.

The man who built it was a refugee. Jean-Jacques Morel was a French priest who fled the Revolution in seventeen ninety two, arrived in England with nothing, and by seventeen ninety six was looking after the French Catholics who had washed up on this hill for the same reason. He raised the money, and the chapel went up in under a year and opened in August eighteen sixteen.

That is the fact worth carrying for the rest of the walk. Hampstead's reputation is poets and money. But this church exists because a village on a hill absorbed a few hundred frightened foreigners and let them build something.

Two names in the register. Graham Greene was married here in nineteen twenty seven, having converted in order to do it, which is where a great deal of his writing starts. And during the Second World War, when the Free French were running their war from London, Charles de Gaulle worshipped here.

Free, and usually open. It is very small and very quiet, and there is a good chance you will be the only one in it.

Walk on

Keep going up Holly Walk. On your left, watch for a squat little building set in the wall: that is the old watch house, where the night watchman sat before anybody had thought of police. The lane opens out at the top. Two minutes.

Track 05 · House & museum · 2:19 · Stop page

Holly Bush Hill

Play2:19

Stop four. Holly Bush Hill, and the painter who ran away twice.

The large weatherboarded building behind the pub is George Romney's house. In seventeen ninety six Romney, who was one of the three most fashionable portrait painters in England, bought the site up here and built himself a house with a picture gallery and a studio in it, which was an odd thing for a sick man in his sixties to do.

He is here because of one face. From seventeen eighty two he painted Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton, later Nelson's mistress, something like sixty times, as Circe, as a bacchante, as Joan of Arc, as anything he could think of. You will be told he came to Hampstead to recover from an affair with her. He did not. She was his model and his obsession and, so far as anybody can show, nothing else, which is stranger and rather sadder.

The ending is the part nobody puts on the plaque. In seventeen ninety nine, after three years in this house, Romney gave it up and went home to Kendal, to the wife he had walked out on roughly thirty-five years earlier and barely seen since. She took him in and nursed him until he died.

The pub in front of you is the Holly Bush, late seventeen hundreds, gas-lit, partitioned, and almost untouched. It is on most people's list of the best pubs in London and it deserves to be.

And round the corner on Windmill Hill is Bolton House, where Joanna Baillie lived for about sixty years. She was the most performed woman playwright of her age. Byron, Wordsworth, Keats and Walter Scott all came up this hill to see her, and Sarah Siddons acted her work. Her plaque went up in nineteen hundred and was only the fourth in London given to a woman.

All free. The pub is not, but that is your own affair.

Walk on

North up Hampstead Grove, one minute. The tall brown house behind wrought-iron gates on your right is stop five.

Track 06 · House & museum · 1:49 · Stop page

Fenton House

Hampstead Grove

Play1:49

Stop five. Fenton House.

Sixteen eighty six, which makes it one of the earliest and largest merchant's houses left in Hampstead, built when this was a hill village a long carriage ride from London. Lady Binning left it to the National Trust in nineteen fifty two with everything still in it.

Two reasons to go in. The first is that this is not a silent house. It holds the Benton Fletcher collection of early keyboard instruments, harpsichords and spinets and virginals and clavichords, the earliest of them from fifteen forty, and they are deliberately kept in playing order rather than in retirement. Musicians come and practise on them during opening hours. If you are lucky, and you often are, you will hear the house before you reach the first floor.

The second is the garden, which is walled, three hundred years old, and laid out on three levels so you never see all of it at once. The orchard at the bottom grows around thirty heritage varieties of apple and pear that the supermarkets gave up on decades ago, and in autumn you are welcome to pick up the windfalls. Go up onto the balcony for the view south. On a clear day you can see the City from a seventeenth-century roof.

National Trust, so there is a charge, and this is one of only two stops on the whole walk that wants money at the door. Generally Wednesday to Sunday in season, and worth checking before you climb the hill.

Walk on

Carry on north up Hampstead Grove for one minute, and take the narrow lane on your left. It is called Admiral's Walk, and the white house with the thing on the roof is stop six.

Track 07 · House & museum · 2:47 · Stop page

Admiral's House

Admiral's Walk

Play2:47

Stop six. Admiral's House.

Look at the roof. That is a quarterdeck, built on top of a house, four miles from the nearest tidal water, with a flagpole and a place to stand and take the salute. It is the least explicable roof in London.

The house went up in the early seventeen hundreds. In seventeen seventy five it was bought by Lieutenant Fountain North, of the Royal Navy, who added the quarterdeck and is said to have fired cannon from it to mark naval victories and royal birthdays, which cannot have been popular with the neighbours.

And now the correction, which is the whole reason to stand here. No admiral has ever lived in Admiral's House. There was a real admiral in Hampstead, Matthew Barton, and he also let off cannon, and at some point the village put the two men together and gave the house to the wrong one. The mistake then spread to the lane, which is why you are standing in Admiral's Walk. Nobody has ever bothered to correct it, and by now it would be vandalism.

Two people who took it seriously. John Constable painted this house again and again, and one of those paintings is in the Victoria and Albert. And George Gilbert Scott lived here from eighteen fifty six, which means the man who designed Saint Pancras station and the Albert Memorial was working out of a house pretending to be a ship.

One more. If you have ever seen Mary Poppins, you know a naval gentleman who fires a cannon from his roof and knocks the furniture over. This is where Admiral Boom comes from.

And look next door, at Grove Lodge. John Galsworthy lived in it from nineteen eighteen until he died in nineteen thirty three, wrote most of the Forsyte Saga in it, and took the Nobel Prize for literature out of it in nineteen thirty two. Two houses, sharing a wall, and between them a cannon and a Nobel.

There is also a plaque a little further down Hampstead Grove to George du Maurier, who lived there in the eighteen seventies and eighties and wrote Trilby, the novel that gave the language Svengali. Hold on to that name. His son is at stop twenty-three and his granddaughter wrote Rebecca.

Free, and private. Look from the lane and do not ring the bell.

Walk on

Back to Hampstead Grove and keep going north. Lower Terrace runs off to the left, and at the end of it, behind a gate, on top of what looks like a grass-covered bunker, is stop seven.

Track 08 · High ground · 1:31 · Stop page

Hampstead Observatory

Lower Terrace

Play1:31

Stop seven. The Hampstead Observatory.

A small white dome on the roof of a Victorian reservoir, at the highest point of the highest hill in inner London. It was built in nineteen ten by the Hampstead Scientific Society, which had been formed eleven years earlier by local people who wanted to look at things, and the Society is still running it now, with volunteers, a hundred and sixteen years later.

Inside is a six-inch Cooke refractor from the end of the nineteenth century, lent to the Society in nineteen twenty three by a member and never taken back. It is a beautiful piece of brass engineering and it is still the instrument they use.

Here is the part worth writing down. It is open to the public, it is free, and almost nobody in London knows. Friday and Saturday evenings, eight until ten, from the middle of September to the middle of April, plus Sunday mornings to look at the sun through the proper filters. All of that is weather permitting, which in this country is doing a great deal of work.

You are two hundred metres from a tube station, looking at Saturn, for nothing, in a shed on a reservoir. That is the single most Hampstead sentence in this guide.

Walk on

Back to Hampstead Grove and keep climbing north. Ninety seconds, and the road runs out at a junction with a pond in the middle of it.

Track 09 · High ground · 2:11 · Stop page

Whitestone Pond

the top of Heath Street

Play2:11

Stop eight. Whitestone Pond, and the roof of London.

You are standing at a hundred and thirty-four metres above sea level, and there is a flagstaff by the water marking four hundred and forty feet. This is the highest point in London, and here is the honest version of that claim. It is the highest point in inner London, comfortably. It is not the highest point in Greater London, which is Westerham Heights, out on the Kent border in Bromley, and nearly twice as high. Nobody has ever put a flagstaff on that one, because nobody would come.

The pond is older than the road. It was the Horse Pond, fed by nothing but rain and dew, and the ramps were cut into it so that carters could drive horses in to drink and wash their hooves at the top of the climb out of London. The white stone that gives it its name is a milestone, still there at the edge, counting the miles back to Holborn.

Height had a use before it had a view. High ground like this carried the beacon chain, the line of fires lit across the country to raise the alarm, and Hampstead's beacon stood up here in the years when England was waiting for the Spanish Armada. The flagstaff is a polite descendant of a bonfire meant to tell London it was in trouble.

Later it went slightly to its head. Victorian Hampstead called this Hampstead-on-Sea, paddled in it, sailed model boats on it, and skated on it in hard winters.

Turn round slowly. On a clear day you can see Harrow on the Hill to the west and the whole eastern skyline of London below you, and you are still standing in a road junction.

Free, and there is a bus stop here for anyone who has already had enough.

Walk on

West down North End Way, keeping the Heath on your left, for about eight minutes. Watch on the left for Inverforth Close, which is a private-looking turning that is not private. Follow it to the end and go up the steps.

Track 10 · High ground · 2:04 · Stop page

The Hill Garden and Pergola

Inverforth Close, North End Way

Play2:04

Stop nine. The Hill Garden, and the Pergola.

You have found the raised walkway. Go up and along it slowly, because this is the strangest thing on the Heath and it takes a minute to work out what you are looking at.

It belonged to William Hesketh Lever, the soap millionaire who became Lord Leverhulme, and who bought the house here in nineteen oh four. He hired Thomas Mawson, the leading garden designer of the day, and told him he wanted a terrace to entertain on, raised high enough to look out over the Heath rather than up at it.

The problem was the material. You cannot raise several acres of ground without an enormous quantity of spoil, and spoil is expensive to buy and ruinous to cart. And then in nineteen oh seven the tube arrived in Hampstead, which meant men digging a tunnel a mile away and no idea what to do with what came out of it. Lever did the deal. The terrace you are walking on is the inside of Hampstead's hill, taken out of the ground to make the Northern line, and stacked up here.

He kept extending it until he died in nineteen twenty five, at which point it was about two hundred and thirty metres of colonnade and nobody wanted the upkeep. It went to the public in nineteen sixty three and it has been gently falling apart ever since, which is precisely why it looks like this. Wisteria in the joints, no roof in places, and the best decayed-grandeur photograph in London.

Free. Open daily from half past eight until dusk, and it is at its ridiculous best in the first two weeks of June.

Walk on

Back out to North End Way and turn left, north-west, for about seven minutes. The gates of Golders Hill Park are on your left, opposite the end of West Heath Avenue.

Track 11 · High ground · 1:42 · Stop page

Golders Hill Park

North End Way

Play1:42

Stop ten. Golders Hill Park.

This is the tidy end of the Heath. Thirty-six acres of Victorian park with mown grass, a bandstand, and a walled flower garden, all of it attached to a wilderness, which is a very odd thing to walk into after the Pergola.

There was a mansion here. A bomb removed it during the war and the ruins were cleared afterwards, so the lawn where the house stood is now simply the best place in the park to sit down.

What you came for is behind the trees to the north. There is a zoo, it is free, and it is properly good. Ring-tailed lemurs, donkeys, a collection of birds, and a small herd of fallow deer in a paddock that is large enough that you sometimes have to look for them. In summer there is a butterfly house. It is run by the City of London Corporation as part of the Heath, and there is no ticket office, no queue, and no gift shop at the end of it, which by the standards of London zoology is close to miraculous.

There is also a decent cafe, and this is the right place on this walk to eat something, because from here on there is nothing until the ponds.

Free. Open daily, and the deer are more active in the first hour.

Walk on

Out of the gates, turn round, and walk back south-east up North End Way. It is a steady climb of about twelve minutes back to Whitestone Pond. Stop eleven is the large white weatherboarded building on the corner as you arrive.

Track 12 · Village · 2:30 · Stop page

Jack Straw's Castle

North End Way

Play2:30

Stop eleven. Jack Straw's Castle, which is no longer a pub and has not been one since two thousand and two.

Stand back and look at it anyway, because for two hundred years this was where London came up the hill to. The name belongs to a leader of the Peasants' Revolt of thirteen eighty one, who is supposed to have addressed a crowd from a hay wagon on this spot. That is a story rather than a record, and it has been attached to the site since at least the seventeenth century.

What is documented is the walking. Dickens used this pub as the destination at the end of a good march, and wrote to his friend John Forster proposing exactly that: a brisk walk over Hampstead Heath, and a red-hot chop and a glass of good wine at Jack Straw's Castle at the end of it. Thackeray came. Wilkie Collins came. And Karl Marx, who lived down the hill in Kentish Town, brought his family up here on Sundays for roast veal, beer and donkey rides for the children, which is documented in more detail than most of his economics.

It is also in Dracula, which is set partly on this hill. Van Helsing and Doctor Seward eat dinner at Jack Straw's Castle before walking out along Spaniards Road on the business of Lucy, who is buried in a Hampstead churchyard that Stoker never quite names. He knew the ground. The Heath in that book is the safe green edge of London where something is going wrong, which is roughly how it still reads at dusk.

The building in front of you is not the one they drank in. That was bombed, and this replacement went up in the early nineteen sixties, in weatherboard, by Raymond Erith, the architect who later rebuilt the inside of Ten Downing Street. It is now flats and a gym, and it is listed, which means the state has protected a nineteen sixties pastiche of an eighteenth-century inn. London does this constantly and it is usually the right answer.

Free to look at. Nothing to go into.

Walk on

Cross to the Heath side and take the path running east beside Spaniards Road for about two hundred metres. Then bear right, downhill, off the ridge. A narrow lane drops away in front of you into a hollow full of houses. Five minutes.

Track 13 · Village · 2:07 · Stop page

The Vale of Health

off East Heath Road

Play2:07

Stop twelve. The Vale of Health.

A hamlet of about a hundred houses, completely surrounded by open Heath, with one road in and the same road out. There is no through traffic because there is nowhere to go through to.

The name is a lie, and a very good one. Until the end of the eighteenth century this hollow was a marsh called Hatchett's Bottom, which was drained in seventeen seventy seven when the water company got to work on the ponds. The first houses went up on the drained ground, somebody needed to sell them, and by eighteen oh one the deeds are calling it the Vale of Health. A malarial bog renamed as a health resort, and it worked so completely that the older name has vanished.

Who lived here is out of all proportion to its size. Leigh Hunt took a house in eighteen sixteen and turned it into the meeting place of a generation, which means Keats, Shelley, Byron and Hazlitt all walked down this lane. Rabindranath Tagore stayed here in nineteen twelve, the year the English Gitanjali was being prepared in London, and he had the Nobel Prize within months. D H Lawrence and Frieda lived at number one Byron Villas in nineteen fifteen, the year The Rainbow was prosecuted for obscenity and the unsold copies were burned by order of the court.

Behind the houses, if you look, are the caravans and yards of the showmen who run the funfair that still comes onto the Heath on bank holidays. It is the least likely industrial estate in London.

Free. It is somebody's street, so read the room.

Walk on

Back up the lane the way you came, and rejoin Spaniards Road at the top. Turn right and follow it north-east along the ridge, with the Heath falling away on both sides, for about twelve minutes. The road narrows to a pinch, and the pinch is stop thirteen.

Track 14 · Village · 1:50 · Stop page

The Spaniards Inn

Spaniards Road

Play1:50

Stop thirteen. The Spaniards Inn, and the toll house that is still in the way.

Look at the road before you look at the pub. The little building on the other side is an eighteenth-century toll house, and the gap between the two of them is why every bus, van and lorry on this road has to wait its turn. A tollgate that stopped collecting tolls generations ago is still, physically, taxing your journey.

The inn claims fifteen eighty five. What happened here that we can date exactly is the Gordon Riots, in June seventeen eighty. An anti-Catholic mob came up the hill intending to burn down Kenwood, which is ten minutes further along this road and belonged to Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice, because he was thought to be too soft on Catholics. The landlord opened his cellars to them in the garden. Mansfield's steward, who had run down here in a panic, helped. By the time the cavalry arrived the mob had been drinking free for hours and was in no condition to burn anything. Kenwood is still standing because of a bar bill.

It has the literary traffic you would expect. Dickens sends Mrs Bardell and her friends up here in Pickwick Papers, Bram Stoker points at it in Dracula, and it has claimed Dick Turpin for two hundred years, which is romantic and almost certainly untrue.

Open as a pub, with a large garden, and it is the last chance for lunch before Kenwood.

Walk on

Continue east along Hampstead Lane, past the toll house, for about five minutes. The gate into the Kenwood estate is on your right. Go in and follow the drive until the trees stop.

Track 15 · House & museum · 2:11 · Stop page

Kenwood House

Hampstead Lane

Play2:11

Stop fourteen. Kenwood.

A white villa at the top of a slope of grass, with a lake below it. Before you go in, look at the little bridge on the lake. It is a fake. There is no bridge, only a painted timber front, put there in the eighteenth century because the view needed one, and it has been fooling people from this exact angle for two hundred years.

The house is Robert Adam's, remodelled from seventeen sixty four for William Murray, the first Earl of Mansfield, and the Great Library is the reason architects come. It is a room with a curved and painted ceiling, screens of columns at each end, and pale blue and pink and gilt everywhere. It should be exhausting and instead it is one of the calmest rooms in England.

What is hanging on the walls is the real surprise. Edward Cecil Guinness, the first Earl of Iveagh, bought the estate in nineteen twenty five, died two years later, and left the house and sixty-three paintings to the nation on the condition that people could see them for nothing. So there is a Rembrandt self-portrait, late, with two mysterious circles on the wall behind him. There is a Vermeer. There is Gainsborough, Reynolds, Turner and Hals. It is free, it has always been free, and it is never full.

One more thing about that Vermeer. In February nineteen seventy four somebody put a sledgehammer through the barred window and took it, and then demanded the transfer of two IRA prisoners as the price of its return. It came back three months later, wrapped in newspaper, propped in a City churchyard. Nobody was ever charged.

Free. Open daily, and book ahead if you want to be certain of the house.

Walk on

Do not leave yet. Stay inside, find the portrait of two young women in the garden, one of them carrying fruit. Stop fifteen is standing in front of it.

Track 16 · House & museum · 2:27 · Stop page

Dido Elizabeth Belle

inside Kenwood

Play2:27

Stop fifteen. Dido Elizabeth Belle.

She was born in seventeen sixty one, the daughter of Sir John Lindsay, a naval officer and Lord Mansfield's nephew, and an enslaved woman called Maria Belle. She was brought to this house as a small child and she lived in it for about thirty years, raised alongside her cousin Elizabeth Murray, running the dairy and the poultry yard, and helping Mansfield with his correspondence. A visiting American described being unable to make sense of her position at the dinner table, which tells you rather more about him than about her.

The portrait shows the two cousins together and gives them equal weight, which for its date is close to unheard of. It was attributed to Zoffany for two centuries and turns out to be by a young Scot called David Martin. The original hangs in Perthshire now, so what you are looking at here is a copy.

And then the law. In seventeen seventy two Mansfield decided the Somerset case, in which an enslaved man in England was to be shipped to Jamaica and sold, and he ruled that it could not be done. It is the judgment everybody quotes as the end of slavery in England, and two things about that are worth getting straight while you are standing here.

The first is that the famous line, that the air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe in, was not Mansfield's. It was said by James Somerset's barrister, quoting a much older case, and it has been put in the judge's mouth by two hundred years of retelling. The second is that Mansfield's ruling was deliberately narrow. He tried repeatedly to make the parties settle so that he would not have to decide anything at all, and slavery went on being legal in the colonies for another sixty years.

He did free Dido in his will, explicitly, and left her money. He knew exactly what he had not done.

Walk on

Out of the house by the south front and down across the lawn. Keep the lake on your right, follow the path east out of the estate, and pick up Millfield Lane heading south. Eight minutes. The gate on your right is stop sixteen, and if you are a man you are not going through it.

Track 17 · Water · 1:53 · Stop page

The Kenwood Ladies' Pond

off Millfield Lane

Play1:53

Stop sixteen. The Kenwood Ladies' Pond, which opened in nineteen twenty six and is therefore a hundred years old this year.

It is the only lifeguarded women-only open-water swimming place in Britain, it is open every single day of the year, and it is spring-fed and unheated, which means about four degrees in February and low twenties in August. Women swim through the winter here in numbers that grow every year.

What is behind the hedge is a walled meadow with a concrete jetty, a set of steps into brown water, lifeguards, and a rule against photographs that everybody actually keeps. That last part is the point of it. There is nowhere else within a hundred miles where several hundred women a day undress outdoors, in public, and are neither photographed nor commented on.

It has been defended, repeatedly and successfully, by the association of swimmers who use it, ever since the nineteen seventies. When the City of London has proposed changes here, the swimmers have generally won.

If you are a woman: pay at the gate, take a towel, and give yourself half an hour. If you are not: the hedge is the answer, and the men's pond is four minutes further on.

Small charge to swim, and free to walk past.

Walk on

South down Millfield Lane, with the ponds through the trees on your right. Keats met Coleridge in this lane in April eighteen nineteen and walked with him for two miles while Coleridge talked without stopping about nightingales, dreams, mermaids and metaphysics. Keats wrote the whole list down afterwards. Four minutes.

Track 18 · Water · 1:37 · Stop page

The Highgate Men's Pond

Millfield Lane

Play1:37

Stop seventeen. The Highgate Men's Pond.

Also open every day of the year. Also lifeguarded, also unheated, and rather less discreet than the one you have just walked past: there is a diving board, a concrete deck, and a large meadow beside it where the sunbathing has been famously and legally unclothed for decades.

In midwinter, when the water is close to freezing, there is a queue. The men who swim here through January are mostly not athletes, they are simply people who have decided that this is what they do, and the club culture around it goes back well over a century.

Three ponds on this Heath are open for swimming and it is worth knowing the difference. The men's pond and the ladies' pond run all year. The mixed pond, further down the other chain, only opens from April to October. All of them are lifeguarded, all of them charge a few pounds, and none of them will let you in when the lifeguards have gone home. That is not bureaucracy. It is cold, deep, dark water with weed in it, and people who have ignored that rule have died in it.

Small charge to swim.

Walk on

Leave the lane and strike west across the Heath, uphill, away from the water. Aim for the trees on the skyline. Seven minutes, and you are looking for a low round mound inside an iron fence, which is easy to walk straight past.

Track 19 · High ground · 1:51 · Stop page

The Tumulus

south of the Highgate Ponds

Play1:51

Stop eighteen. The tumulus, which the whole of north London calls Boudica's grave.

It is a round mound, about thirty-six metres across and three metres high, ringed with railings and padlocked, with trees growing out of the top of it. It is a scheduled ancient monument, which is the same legal protection given to Stonehenge.

The story is that the queen of the Iceni was buried here after her defeat by the Romans in about the year sixty one. It is a wonderful story and there is no evidence for it whatsoever. It seems to have been attached to the mound in the nineteenth century by people who wanted it to be true, which is also how Boudica came to be buried under a platform at King's Cross, in another story that is equally popular and equally baseless.

In eighteen ninety four the British Museum sent Charles Hercules Read to dig it, in front of a considerable crowd. He cut into it, found some charcoal, and found nothing else at all. His conclusion was that anything buried here would have dissolved in the acid soil long ago, which is honest, and which settles nothing.

So it is probably a Bronze Age burial mound, three and a half thousand years old, sitting between a running track and a swimming pond. Or it is the base of a seventeenth-century windmill, which is the other serious theory and a considerably worse afternoon out.

Free, and you cannot go in, and neither can anybody else.

Walk on

South-west, up the last of the slope, three minutes, until the ground stops rising and there are benches and a great many people facing the same way.

Track 20 · High ground · 1:48 · Stop page

Parliament Hill

Parliament Hill Fields

Play1:48

Stop nineteen. Parliament Hill. Ninety-eight metres, and the best free view in London.

Take it left to right. Canary Wharf on the far left, then the towers of the City in a clump, then the dome of Saint Paul's sitting low and pale in front of them, then the Shard, and on a good day the transmitter at Crystal Palace on the ridge beyond.

Now the thing almost nobody standing here knows. That view is protected by law. Saint Paul's as seen from this hill is a designated Protected Vista, which means that if a developer proposes a tower anywhere in the corridor between you and the cathedral, they must model it from this spot, and if it gets in the way it does not get built. The London skyline has been shaped, repeatedly, by a sightline from a bench on a hill in Camden.

The name is unsettled. The likeliest explanation is that Parliamentary troops were stationed up here during the Civil War, guarding the northern approach to London. The better story, which you will be told, is that the Gunpowder plotters came up here to watch Parliament explode. There is no evidence for it and it appears to have been invented in the nineteenth century, along with a good deal else on this hill.

It is also called Kite Hill, and on any windy Saturday you will see why.

Free, and the first hour after sunrise is the version to see.

Walk on

Down the north-west slope, past the running track, and keep going down to the bottom corner of the Heath on Gordon House Road. Eight minutes. Stop seventeen is the long blue rectangle behind the fence.

Track 21 · Water · 1:11 · Stop page

Parliament Hill Lido

Gordon House Road

Play1:11

Stop twenty. Parliament Hill Lido.

Sixty metres of unheated open-air water, opened in nineteen thirty eight at the very end of the great age of London lido building, when the London County Council was putting these things up across the city on the theory that working people were entitled to swim outdoors in the sun.

Most of them are gone. This one survived, is listed, and was relined in stainless steel, which is why on a bright morning the whole pool looks like mercury and photographs better than anything else on this walk.

It is open every day of the year and it is not heated on any of them. In January the water sits around four degrees and there is still a queue at seven in the morning. There is a serious early-swimming culture here that has nothing to do with fitness and everything to do with the twenty minutes afterwards.

Charged, cheaper early, and towels are your own problem.

Walk on

Back up onto the Heath and head north-east, downhill, to the bottom of the chain of ponds on the Hampstead side, near South End Green. Ten minutes. Walk up the path with the water on your left.

Track 22 · Water · 2:42 · Stop page

The Hampstead Ponds and the River Fleet

the Hampstead chain

Play2:42

Stop twenty-one. The ponds, and the river underneath them.

None of these is a lake. Every pond on this Heath is a dammed valley, and the grass bank you are walking along is the dam. The water in them is the River Fleet, which rises in two arms up on this hill, one under this chain and one under the Highgate chain, and which meets itself at Camden Town before running down under Farringdon and out into the Thames at Blackfriars.

They also open English literature, in a way nobody expects. The first thing that happens in Charles Dickens's first novel is that Samuel Pickwick reads a paper to his club. The paper is about the source of the Hampstead Ponds, with some further observations on the theory of tittlebats. That is the joke Dickens chose to start with, and it only works because in eighteen thirty six a learned paper on these ponds was exactly the sort of thing a learned gentleman would write.

It was dammed for money. The Hampstead Water Company was incorporated in sixteen ninety two to supply London, and it spent the next century blocking these streams and piping the water down the hill in hollowed elm trunks. The ponds you swim in are a privatised seventeenth-century water utility that nobody ever got round to filling in.

Downstream, the Fleet was progressively covered over, turned into a sewer, and forgotten so completely that Fleet Street is named after a river most Londoners assume never existed. It is still down there. In heavy rain you can hear it through the gratings at Ray Street in Clerkenwell.

And then the modern argument. Because these are legally reservoirs, and because a dam failure here would send water down into Camden and Kentish Town, the City of London was required to rebuild the dams. It did, between twenty fourteen and twenty sixteen, at enormous cost, against a furious local campaign called Dam Nonsense. The result is the gentle grassy slopes you are standing on, which are engineered spillways pretending to be scenery. They look like they have always been there. That is the whole idea.

Free.

Walk on

Carry on down to the bottom of the ponds and out onto South End Green. Take Keats Grove, which runs west off it. Three minutes. The white house behind the garden wall on your left is stop twenty-two.

Track 23 · House & museum · 2:16 · Stop page

Keats House

Keats Grove

Play2:16

Stop twenty-two. Keats House.

It was built as a pair of semi-detached houses called Wentworth Place, and it is why you are on this street rather than any other. John Keats moved into one half in December eighteen eighteen, at twenty-three, having just nursed his brother Tom through the tuberculosis that killed him and that was going to kill Keats. The Brawne family moved into the other half. Fanny Brawne was eighteen. They became engaged over the garden wall, more or less literally.

What happened next is the most productive year in English poetry. In the spring of eighteen nineteen, in this house and this garden, he wrote Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy and Ode to Psyche, which is most of the work he is remembered for, in about three months. His friend Charles Brown said the nightingale had built a nest in the garden that spring, that Keats took a chair out under the plum tree one morning, and that he came back in with scraps of paper he then pushed behind some books. That is Ode to a Nightingale.

He left in September eighteen twenty for the Italian climate, on the advice of doctors who had nothing else to offer. He died in Rome five months later, aged twenty-five, convinced he had failed.

The house was nearly demolished in the nineteen twenties and was saved by public subscription, a great deal of it raised in America. The plum tree is a replacement. Everything else is astonishingly quiet.

Ticketed, and inexpensive. Generally Wednesday to Friday and Sunday, so check before you come.

Walk on

Out of the gate, west along Keats Grove to Downshire Hill, then right into Willow Road. You will pass number two, which is a museum and is on a longer list than this one. Cross East Heath Road, climb, and bear left into Cannon Place. Cannon Lane drops away on your left. Eight minutes, and stop twenty-three is a door in a wall.

Track 24 · Village · 2:05 · Stop page

The Cannon Lane Lock-Up

Cannon Lane

Play2:05

Stop twenty-three. The parish lock-up, in the wall on your left.

A heavy studded door, a barred slit at head height, and behind it a single windowless cell, built into the garden wall of the house above in about seventeen thirty. This is a village prison, and it is one of very few left anywhere in London.

The point of it is what did not exist yet. There was no police force. There was a parish constable, usually a shopkeeper doing a year of unpaid duty, and if he arrested you at ten at night there was nowhere on earth to put you. So you went in here, in the dark, until the morning, when the magistrates could see you. The magistrates sat in the house behind this wall, which meant the whole apparatus of law in Hampstead was one cell, one wall and one front room.

It stopped being used after eighteen twenty nine, when Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police arrived and the parish stopped having to improvise. The cell is now the entrance to somebody's very expensive house.

And the house it belongs to is Cannon Hall, which from nineteen sixteen was the home of Gerald du Maurier, the actor-manager. He was the first man ever to play Captain Hook, and in the same production the first to play Mr Darling, which is why to this day the two parts are usually doubled. His daughter grew up in that house and wrote Rebecca.

Which closes a circle, if you want it to. The boys who became Peter Pan are buried at stop two, twenty minutes back down the hill. The man who first played the villain lived behind this wall.

Free, visible from the lane at any hour, and easy to walk past.

Walk on

Back down Cannon Place the way you came, then right and downhill into Well Walk. Two minutes. You will pass a small stone drinking fountain, and it is the reason the whole village exists.

Track 25 · Village · 2:11 · Stop page

Well Walk and Burgh House

Well Walk and New End Square

Play2:11

Stop twenty-four. Well Walk, the well, and Burgh House.

Start at the fountain. That is the chalybeate well, and chalybeate means the water has iron in it. In sixteen ninety eight the young Earl of Gainsborough and his mother gave six acres of ground around these springs to trustees, in perpetuity, for the benefit of the poor of Hampstead. The trust they set up that day still exists and still gives money away in this parish, three hundred and twenty-eight years later.

What the trustees did with it in the meantime was open a spa. Hampstead Wells sold the water by the flask in London, built a pump room and assembly rooms, and for about fifty years this village was a resort. It went the way of eighteenth-century resorts: successful, then crowded, then disreputable, then over. The fountain in front of you is a Victorian replacement, and no, do not drink from it.

At number forty, further along, John Constable lived from eighteen twenty seven. He painted the sky above this Heath obsessively, in oil, outdoors, dozens and dozens of studies with the weather and the time of day written on the back, decades before anyone thought that was a reasonable way to spend an afternoon. His wife Maria died in that house in eighteen twenty eight. He is buried where you started, at stop two.

And on New End Square, thirty seconds away, is Burgh House. Seventeen oh four, Grade One listed, free to walk into, with the Hampstead Museum on the first floor and a decent cafe in the basement that opens onto a garden. In the nineteen thirties it was the home of Rudyard Kipling's daughter, and Kipling's last outing before he died in January nineteen thirty six was to come here and see her.

Free. Generally Wednesday to Friday and Sunday, from late morning.

Track 26 · Closing · 1:49

Three ways to walk it

If you do not have three hours

Play1:49

That is the twenty-four. The station is four minutes away: Flask Walk out of the top of Well Walk, then left up the High Street, and you are back where you started.

Three hours is a Saturday, not a Tuesday, so here are three shorter versions that fit a real week.

The first: the village hour. About fifty minutes, free, any day, no bookings. Stops one through eight, then twenty-three and twenty-four. The station, the church row, the French chapel, Romney's hill, Fenton House, the quarterdeck, the observatory and the top of London, then the lock-up and Well Walk on the way back. No mud, and you can do it in office shoes.

The second: the houses. Half a day, Wednesday to Sunday, because that is the one window when all four of them are open. Stops five, fourteen, fifteen, twenty-two and twenty-four. Fenton House, Kenwood, Keats House and Burgh House. Kenwood and Burgh House are free, Keats is a few pounds, Fenton House is the one that charges properly. Book Kenwood if you want to be sure of the house.

The third: the water. Any day of the year, and this is the one to do at seven in the morning. Stops sixteen or seventeen, then twenty, then twenty-one. The ladies' pond and the men's pond are open every day of the year, the mixed pond only from April to October, and the lido never closes. Swim, then walk up the ponds to South End Green for breakfast. It will reorganise your entire opinion of London.

Track 27 · Closing · 2:36

Didn't make the cut

The near misses

Play2:36

Last track. Eight places cut for distance rather than for quality. All times are walking, from Hampstead station.

The Freud Museum, twelve minutes, at twenty Maresfield Gardens. Freud got out of Vienna in nineteen thirty eight and died here the following year, and the consulting room is intact, rugs, antiquities, couch and all. Ticketed, Wednesday to Sunday.

Two Willow Road, fifteen minutes, which you walked past between stops twenty-two and twenty-three. Ernő Goldfinger built it for himself in nineteen thirty nine and it is now National Trust. He demolished cottages to do it, which annoyed a neighbour called Ian Fleming so thoroughly that Fleming gave the name to a Bond villain. Goldfinger consulted his lawyers. He did not sue.

The Isokon building, twenty minutes, on Lawn Road. Nineteen thirty four, the first modernist block of flats in Britain, built with communal everything and almost no kitchens. Gropius, Breuer and Moholy-Nagy all lived in it, so did Agatha Christie, and so did a working cell of Soviet agents. Small free gallery, weekends in the warmer half of the year.

Highgate Cemetery, thirty-five minutes across the Heath. Marx, George Eliot, Douglas Adams, and the Egyptian Avenue. Ticketed, and the west side is the one to book.

The Flask at Highgate, thirty minutes, if you have gone to the cemetery anyway. Sixteen sixty three, and a warren.

Kentish Town City Farm, twenty-five minutes. Britain's first city farm, nineteen seventy two, and still free.

And the Everyman, two minutes from where you started, on Holly Bush Vale. A drill hall, then a theatre, then a cinema from nineteen thirty three, and it is still showing films tonight.

Two closing warnings. The opening hours in this guide were checked in August twenty twenty-six and they are the first thing that will change, so confirm before you set out for anything ticketed. And the Heath has no lighting. After dark it is genuinely dark, the paths are not obvious, and the swimming ponds are only open when the lifeguards are there.

That is the end of the walk. The station is behind you.

The questions Asked and answered

Everything below is already somewhere in the narration. It is repeated here in the order people ask it.

How long does the Hampstead Heath walk take?

Something over three hours of walking before you stop for anything at all, plus fifty-five minutes of narration that you listen to standing still. Half a day is the honest answer. There is a fifty-minute village version that skips the Heath itself.

Is the audio guide free?

Yes, and there is nothing to install: it is a web page, and the tracks stream only when you press play. Of the twenty-four stops, nineteen cost nothing at all. Three more are free unless you get into the water – the Kenwood Ladies' Pond, the Highgate Men's Pond and Parliament Hill Lido. Two charge at the door: Fenton House and Keats House. Kenwood House itself is free.

Where does the walk start and finish?

Outside Hampstead Underground station on Heath Street, NW3. It is a single anticlockwise loop, so it finishes in the same place – four minutes from the last stop, up Flask Walk and left along the High Street.

Do I need a phone signal to use it?

No. Tracks stream only when you ask for one, the photographs load as you scroll, and the map is drawn in the page rather than fetched as tiles, so it works on one bar. The middle of the Heath has patchy signal, so there is also a single continuous file to download before you set out.

Can you swim in the Hampstead Heath ponds?

Yes. The Kenwood Ladies' Pond and the Highgate Men's Pond are open every day of the year, the Mixed Pond only from April to October, and Parliament Hill Lido never closes. The ponds open only when lifeguards are on duty.

How muddy is Hampstead Heath?

Two thirds of this route is unpaved, the Heath sits on London clay, and it holds water for days after rain. Wear shoes you do not mind. The village half of the walk you can do in office shoes.

Is there a shorter version of the walk?

Three. The village hour is about fifty minutes, free, any day, and has no mud in it. The houses is half a day, Wednesday to Sunday, which is the one window when all four are open. The water is any day of the year and is best at seven in the morning.

Do I need headphones, or can I read it instead?

Either. The whole script is printed on the page, word for word, so you can read it on the train, hand it to someone without headphones, or follow it with the sound off. There is also a GPX file of the route for a map application that can navigate.

How it was made Colophon

Voice

Brian, at 94% of its natural pace – slower than conversation, which is what you want when the listener is also crossing roads and watching for tree roots.

Files

27 AAC tracks, tagged as one album with cover art, plus a single continuous FULL WALK file for anyone who would rather not keep pressing play.

Pictures

One photograph per track, picked to show the thing you are standing in front of rather than the prettiest view of it. All of them are Creative Commons or public domain, from Wikimedia Commons, credited under the picture and fetched by fetch_images.py.

Rebuilding it

The narration lives in one Python file, build.py. The audio and this page are both generated from it, so the transcript can never drift out of step with the recording.

Changing the voice

Any installed system voice works. Swap the name and the pace at the top of the generator and re-run it; the whole set rebuilds in about a minute.

Other shapes

The same walk as a podcast feed, for Apple, Spotify or Overcast; as plain Markdown, for anything that would rather read than render; as GPX, for a map application; and as one page per stop. The source is the narration.