Jack Straw's Castle

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.

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