North London
Everything north of the Marylebone and Euston roads was, for the most part, open countryside until the mid-nineteenth century, and is now largely built up, right the way up to the “green belt” created in the immediate postwar period to try and limit the continuing urban sprawl. North London begins at the Regent’s Canal, which traced the limit of the city’s northern outskirts when it was completed in 1820 and now passes through the heart of Camden Town, with its famous market. Further north are a handful of former satellite villages, now subsumed into the general mass of north London, that run the gamut from wealthy Hampstead to gritty Hackney. Most of north London is easily accessible by tube; in fact, it was the expansion of the tube that encouraged the forward march of bricks and mortar in the outer suburbs.
On its completion in 1820, the Regent’s Canal delineated the city’s northern periphery, passing along the north side of one of London’s finest parks, Regent’s Park, framed by Nash-designed architecture and home to London Zoo. The canal forces its way into most Londoners’ consciousness only at Camden, a rakish place even today, whose market is one of the city’s big attractions – a warren of stalls selling funky wares, street fashion, books and music.
Few visitors to the capital head out to neighbouring Islington, which has its own flourishing antiques trade, and Dalston and Hackney, further east, with their ethnically diverse population, thus missing out on some of north London’s defining areas. The real highlights, though, for visitors and residents alike, are Hampstead and Highgate, elegant, largely eighteenth-century developments, which still reflect their village origins. They have the added advantage of proximity to one of London’s wildest patches of greenery, Hampstead Heath, where you can enjoy stupendous views, kite flying and outdoor bathing, as well as high art at the Neoclassical mansion of Kenwood House.
A few sights in more far-flung suburbs are also worth seeking out: the nineteenth-century utopia of Hampstead Garden Suburb; the Orthodox Jewish suburb of Golders Green; the RAF Museum at Hendon; and the spectacular Hindu temple in Neasden.
REGENT’S CANAL
The Regent’s Canal, completed in 1820, was constructed as part of a direct link from Birmingham to the newly built London Docks in the East End. After an initial period of heavy usage it was overtaken by the railway, and never really paid its way as its investors had hoped. By some miracle, however, it survived, and its nine miles, 42 bridges, twelve locks and two tunnels stand as a reminder of another age. The lock-less stretch of the canal between Little Venice and Camden Town is the busiest, most attractive section, tunnelling through to Lisson Grove, skirting Regent’s Park, offering views of London Zoo and passing straight through the heart of Camden Market. You can walk, jog or cycle along the towpath, but this section of the canal is also served by scheduled narrowboats.
Three companies run daily boat services between Camden and Little Venice, passing through the Maida Hill tunnel. Whichever you choose, you can board at either end; tickets cost around £10 return, and journey time is fifty minutes one-way.
Jenny Wren 
020 7485 4433, 
walkersquay.com. The narrowboat Jenny Wren starts off at Camden, goes through a canal lock
(the only company to do so) and heads for Little Venice (with a live
commentary). March Sat & Sun only; April–Oct
daily.
Jason’s Trip 020 7286 3428, jasons.co.uk. This one hundred-year-old traditional
narrow boat has been running trips since 1951; services set off three or
four times a day from Little Venice to Camden. Cash only, no commentary.
April–early Nov daily.
London Waterbus Company 020 7482 2550, londonwaterbus.com. Services leave from both Camden and
Little Venice, and call in at London Zoo en route. April–Sept daily; Oct Thurs–Sun only;
Nov–March Sat & Sun only, weather permitting.
Little Venice
Warwick Avenue
The Regent’s Canal starts out from the west in the triangular leafy basin known as Little Venice, a nickname coined by one-time resident and poet Robert Browning. The title may be far-fetched, but the willow-tree Browning’s Island is one of the prettiest spots on the canal, and the houseboats and barges moored hereabouts are brightly painted and strewn with tubs of flowers. While you’re here, try and catch a marionette performance on the Puppet Theatre Barge, moored on the Blomfield Road side of the basin, a unique and unforgettable experience; performances take place every weekend at 3pm, and daily throughout the school holidays (except Aug & Sept). You can also catch a canal boat to Camden, or walk south to the Paddington Basin.
St John’s Wood
The residential district of St John’s Wood was built over in the nineteenth century by developers hoping to attract a wealthy clientele with a mixture of semi-detached Italianate villas, multi-occupancy Gothic mansions and white stucco terraces. Edwin Landseer (of Trafalgar Square lions fame), novelist George Eliot and Mrs Fitzherbert, the uncrowned wife of George IV, all lived here, while current residents include knights Richard Branson and Paul McCartney and supermodel Kate Moss.
THE BEATLES IN LONDON
Since the Fab Four lived in London for much of the 1960s, it’s hardly surprising that the capital is riddled with Beatle associations. The prime Beatles landmark is, of course, the Abbey Road zebra crossing featured on the album cover, located near the EMI studios where the group recorded most of their albums. The nearest tube is St John’s Wood – remember to bring three friends plus another to take the photos. Incidentally, Paul McCartney still owns the house at 7 Cavendish Ave, which he bought in 1966, two blocks east of the zebra crossing.
One (short-lived) nearby curiosity was the Apple
Boutique, opened by The Beatles at 94 Baker St ( Baker Street), in December 1967, as a
“beautiful place where you could buy beautiful things”. The psychedelic
murals that covered the entire building were whitewashed over after a
lawsuit by the neighbours, and eight months later The Beatles caused even
more pandemonium when they gave the shop’s entire stock away free in the
closing-down sale – a blue plaque commemorates the shenanigans.
Other Beatles locations include the old Apple headquarters in Savile Row,
Mayfair, where the 1969 rooftop concert took place, while Macca has his
current office on Soho Square. Real devotees of the group should sign up for a Beatles
tour, run by The Original London Walks ( 020 7624 3978, walks.com).
Lord’s Cricket ground
St John’s Wood Rd • Museum Non-match days daily
9.30am-4.30pm • £7.50 • Guided tours all year round daily • £15 • 020 7616 8500, lords.org • _test777 St John’s Wood
The Regent’s Canal was bad news for Thomas Lord, who had only recently been forced to shift his cricket ground due to the construction of Marylebone Road. In 1813, with the canal coming, he once more upped his stumps and relocated, this time to St John’s Wood Road, where Lord’s, as the ground is now known, remains to this day. Lord’s is, of course, home of the MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club), founded in 1787, and the most hallowed institution in the game, boasting a very long members waiting list (unless you’re exceptionally famous or rich). Its politics were neatly summed up by Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, who said, “I have been a member of the Committee of the MCC and of a Conservative cabinet, and by comparison with the cricketers, the Tories seem like a bunch of Commies.”
Lord’s is home to the MCC Museum, the world’s oldest sports museum, which houses the minuscule pottery urn containing the Ashes (along with the complex tale of this odd trophy), numerous historic balls, bats and bails, and a sparrow which was “bowled out” by Jehangir Khan at Lord’s in 1936. The museum can also be visited as part of a guided tour, which sets off from the Grace Gates at the southwest corner of the ground. On the tour, you get to see the famous Long Room (from which the players walk onto the pitch), Lord’s Real Tennis Court, the various stands and the futuristic aluminium Media Centre.
Regent’s Park
Daily 5am to dusk • 0300 061 2300, royalparks.org.uk • _test777 Regent’s Park, Baker Street, Great Portland
Street, St John’s Wood or Camden Town
Regent’s Park is one of London’s smartest parks, with a boating lake, ornamental ponds and waterfalls and wonderful gardens all enclosed in a ring of magnificent nineteenth-century mansions. As with almost all of London’s royal parks, we have Henry VIII to thank for Regent’s Park which he confiscated from the Church for yet more hunting grounds. However, it wasn’t until the reign of the Prince Regent (later George IV) that the park began to take its current form – hence its official title, “The Regent’s Park” – and the public weren’t allowed in until 1845 (and even then for just two days of the week). According to John Nash’s 1811 master plan, the park was to be girded by a continuous belt of terraces, and sprinkled with a total of 56 villas, including a magnificent pleasure palace for the prince himself, linked by Regent Street to Carlton House, George’s palace in St James’s. Inevitably, the plan was never fully realized, but enough was built to create something of the idealized garden city that Nash and the Prince Regent envisaged.
The eastern terraces
Nash’s terraces form a near-unbroken horseshoe of cream-coloured stucco around the Outer Circle. By far the most impressive are the eastern terraces, especially Cumberland Terrace, completed in 1826, and intended as a foil for George IV’s planned pleasure palace and tea pavilion. Its 800ft-long facade, hidden away on the eastern edge of the park, is punctuated by Ionic triumphal arches, peppered with classical alabaster statues and centred on a Corinthian portico with a pediment of sculptures set against a vivid sky-blue background. In 1936 an angry crowd threw bricks through the windows of no. 16, which belonged to American divorcée Mrs Wallis Simpson, whose relationship with Edward VIII was seen as a national calamity, and eventually led to his abdication.
Fifty-two more statues depicting British worthies were planned for the even longer facade of Chester Terrace, to the south, but Nash decided the ridicule they provoked was “painful to the ears of a professional man” and ditched them. Nevertheless, Chester Terrace is worth walking down if only to take in the splendid triumphal arches at each end, which announce the name of the terrace in bold lettering; the northern one features a bust of Nash.
To the north of Cumberland Terrace, the neo-Gothic St Katharine’s Precinct provides a respite from the Grecian surroundings, though not one Nash was at all happy with. The central church serves the Danish community, who have erected a copy of the imposing tenth-century Jelling Stone in an alcove to the right.
The Inner Circle
Of the numerous villas planned for the park itself in Nash’s master plan, only eight were actually built, and of those just two originals have survived around the Inner Circle: St John’s Lodge, built in 1812 and now owned by the Sultan of Brunei, and The Holme, Decimus Burton’s first-ever work (he was just 18 at the time), picturesquely sited by the Y-shaped Boating Lake (open March–Oct), and now owned by a Saudi prince. Within the Inner Circle is the Open Air Theatre, and Queen Mary’s Gardens, which is by far the prettiest section of the whole park. A large slice of the gardens is taken up with a glorious rose garden, featuring some four hundred varieties, surrounded by a ring of ramblers.
London Central Mosque
146 Park Rd • Daily 9am–10pm • Free • 020 7724 3363, iccuk.org • _test777 Marylebone or St John’s Wood
The skyline of Regent’s Park is punctuated by the shiny copper dome and minaret of the London Central Mosque (also known as the Islamic Cultural Centre), built in 1977, and an entirely appropriate addition given the Prince Regent’s taste for the Orient (as expressed in the Brighton Pavilion). Non-Muslim visitors are welcome to visit the information centre, the exhibition on Islam, and the café, and to glance inside the hall of worship, which can hold five thousand or more worshippers and which is dominated by an enormous, sparkling, central chandelier.
Winfield House
On the opposite side of the road from the London Central Mosque is Winfield House, a dull 1930s replacement for Decimus Burton’s Hertford House, built by the heiress to the Woolworth chain, Countess Haugwitz-Reventlow (better known as Barbara Hutton), who gifted Winfield House to the US government during World War II and went on to marry Cary Grant; it’s now the American ambassador’s residence, and tends to be where the US President stays when he visits London.
London Zoo
The lion sits within his cage,
Weeping tears of ruby rage,
He licks his snout, the tears fall down
And water dusty London town.
Regent’s Park • Daily March–Oct 10am–5.30pm; Nov–Feb
10am–4pm • £23 peak season online • Zoo Lates for adults only June & July Fri
6–10pm • 020 7722 3333, zsl.org/zsl-london-zoo • _test777 Camden Town
The northeastern corner of Regent’s Park is occupied by London Zoo. Founded in 1826 with the remnants of the royal menagerie, the enclosures here are as humane as any inner-city zoo could make them, and kids usually enjoy themselves. In particular they love Animal Adventure, the new children’s zoo (and playground) where they can actually handle the animals, and the regular live shows. The invertebrate house (BUGS), Gorilla Kingdom, Butterfly Paradise and the walk-through Rainforest Life and Meet the Monkeys enclosures are also guaranteed winners – book online to avoid queuing.
The zoo boasts some striking architectural features, too, such as the 1930s modernist, spiral-ramped, concrete former penguin pool (where Penguin Books’ original colophon was sketched), designed by the Tecton partnership, led by Berthold Lubetkin, who also made the zoo’s Round House. The Giraffe House, by contrast, was designed in Neoclassical style by Decimus Burton, who was also responsible for the mock-Tudor Clock Tower. Other landmark features are the mountainous Mappin Terraces and the colossal tetrahedral aluminium-framed tent of Lord Snowdon’s modern aviary.
Primrose Hill
The small northern extension of Regent’s Park, known as Primrose Hill, commands a great view of central London from its modest summit. And it lends its name to the much sought-after residential area, to the northeast, which has attracted numerous successful literati and artists over the years: H.G. Wells, W.B. Yeats, Friedrich Engels, Kingsley Amis and Morrissey have all lived here. You might catch the present denizens such as Jamie Oliver, Ewan McGregor, Alan Bennett or Martin Amis browsing the bookshops and galleries on Regent’s Park Road, which skirts Primrose Hill to the east. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath lived in a flat at 3 Chalcot Square, just east of Regent’s Park Road, and it was nearby at 23 Fitzroy Rd, the house that Yeats once lived in, that Plath committed suicide in 1963.
Camden Town
Until the canal arrived, Camden Town wasn’t even a village, but by Victorian times it had become a notorious slum area, an image it took most of the past century to shed. In the meantime, it attracted its fair share of artists, most famously the Camden Town Group formed in 1911 by Walter Sickert, later joined by the likes of Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. These days, you’re more likely to bump into young foreign tourists heading for the market, and as-yet-unknown bands on the lookout for members of the local music industry.
For all the gentrification of the last thirty years, Camden retains a gritty aspect, compounded by the various railway lines that plough through the area, the canal and the large shelter for the homeless on Arlington Road. Its proximity to three mainline stations also made it an obvious point of immigration over the years, particularly for the Irish, but also for Greek Cypriots during the 1950s. Nowadays, the market overwhelms the area, especially at weekends, and is now the district’s best-known attribute.
CAMDEN MARKET
Camden Market was confined to Inverness Street until the 1970s, when the focus shifted to the disused warehouses around Camden Lock. The tiny crafts market which began in the cobbled courtyard by the lock has since mushroomed out of all proportion, with stalls on both sides of Camden High Street and Chalk Farm Road. More than one hundred thousand shoppers turn up here each weekend and Camden Lock and the vast labyrinth of the Stables Market now stay open all week long. For all its tourist popularity, Camden remains a genuinely offbeat place. To avoid the crowds, which can be overpowering in the summer, aim to come either early (before noon) or late (after 4pm), or on a Friday. The nearest tube is Camden Town, though this is exit-only at peak times; Chalk Farm tube is only ten minutes’ walk up Chalk Farm Road from Camden Lock.
Camden Lock
If you’ve seen enough market stalls for one day, stand on the bowed iron footbridge by Camden Lock itself, and admire the castellated former lock-keeper’s house, to the west. You can catch a boat to Little Venice; the flight of three locks to the east begins the canal’s descent to Limehouse and the Thames. The first lock pound is overlooked by Terry Farrell’s former TV-AM Building, now occupied (and revamped) by MTV, but still retaining its giant blue-and-white egg cups from breakfast television days. To the south are the covered basins of the Interchange Warehouse, linked by a disused railway line to the Camden Catacombs, built in the nineteenth century as stables for the pit ponies that used to shunt the railway wagons.
Roundhouse
Chalk Farm Road • 0844 482 8008, roundhouse.org.uk • _test777 Chalk Farm
Camden’s brick-built Roundhouse, on Chalk Farm Road, is now a performing arts venue, but was originally built in 1846 as an engine repair shed for 23 goods engines, arranged around a central turntable. Within fifteen years the engines had outgrown the building, and for the next century it was used for storing booze. In 1964, Arnold Wesker established the place as a political theatre venue, and two years later, the Roundhouse began to stage rock gigs – everyone from Hendrix and The Doors to The Ramones and Kraftwerk – and other nonconformist happenings. In 1966, it held a launch party for the underground paper, International Times, at which Pink Floyd and Soft Machine both performed, later hosting a Dialectics of Liberation conference organized by R.D. Laing, not to mention performances by the anarchist Living Theatre of New York, featuring a naked cast.
Jewish Museum
129 Albert St • Mon-Thurs & Sun 10am–5pm, Fri
10am–2pm • £7.50 • First Thurs of month 5–9pm • £3.50 • 020 7284 7384, jewishmuseum.org.uk • _test777 Camden Town
Despite having no significant Jewish associations, Camden is home to London’s purpose-built Jewish Museum. The Welcome Gallery, on the ground floor, features ten extremely varied accounts of what it’s like to be Jewish in contemporary London, from a teenager at the JFS to an Orthodox rabbi – you also get to see a thirteenth-century ritual bath (mikveh) from the City. On the first floor, there’s an engaging exhibition explaining Jewish practices and illustrated by cabinets of Judaica from all over Europe, including a seventeenth-century Venetian Ark of the Covenant and treasures from London’s Great Synagogue in the City, burnt down by Nazi bombers in 1941. On the second floor, there’s an interactive display on the history of British Jews from 1066 onwards, with good sections on Yiddish theatre, boxing, tailoring plus a special Holocaust gallery which focuses on Leon Greenman (1920–2008), one of only two British Jews who suffered and survived Auschwitz. The museum also puts on a lively programme of special exhibitions on the top floor, as well as various talks, films, discussions and concerts, and has a café on the ground floor.
Islington
Angel
Since the 1960s, Islington’s picturesque but dilapidated Regency and early Victorian squares and terraces have been snapped up by professionals and City types and comprehensively renovated. The impact of this gentrification, however, has been relatively minor on the borough as a whole, which stretches as far north as Highgate Hill, and remains one of the city’s poorest. Chapel Market (Tues–Sun), to the west of Upper Street, selling cheap clothes, fruit and veg and Arsenal football memorabilia, is a salutary reminder of Islington’s working-class roots. For more on the history of Islington, visit the borough’s museum.
There’s little evidence of those roots on the main drag, Upper Street: the arrival of its antique market – confusingly known as Camden Passage – coincided with the new influx of cash-happy customers, and its pubs and restaurants reflect the wealth of its new residents. For entertainment, Islington boasts the long-established King’s Head pub theatre, the Little Angel puppet theatre and the ever-popular Almeida plus several live-music venues. All of which make Islington one of the liveliest areas of north London in the evening – a kind of off-West End.
ORTON IN ISLINGTON
Playwright Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell lived together for sixteen years, spending the last eight years of their lives in a top-floor bedsit at 25 Noel Rd, to the east of Upper Street, where the Regent’s Canal emerges from the Islington tunnel. It’s ironic that the borough council has seen fit to erect a plaque on the house commemorating the couple, when it was instrumental in pressing for harsh prison sentences after both men were found guilty of stealing and defacing local library books in 1962. A few of the wittily doctored books are now on display at the Islington Museum.
Six months in prison worked wonders for Orton’s writing, as he himself said: “Being in the nick brought detachment to my writing”. It also brought him success, with irreverent comedies like Loot, Entertaining Mr Sloane and What the Butler Saw playing to sell-out audiences in the West End and on Broadway. Orton’s meteoric fame and his sexual profligacy drove Halliwell to despair, however, and on August 9, 1967, Halliwell finally cracked – beating Orton to death with a hammer and then killing himself with a drug overdose. Their ashes were mixed together and scattered over the grass at Golders Green Crematorium. Apart from the local public toilets, Orton’s favourite hangout was the appropriately entitled Island Queen pub, at the end of Noel Road.
Upper Street
Looking at the traffic fighting its way along Upper Street, it’s hard to believe that “merry Islington”, as it was known, was once a spa resort to which people would come to drink the pure water and breathe the clean air. And walking along Upper Street (and several of the surrounding streets), it’s impossible not to be struck by one of the area’s quirky architectural features – the raised pavements which protected pedestrians from splattered mud. Such precautions were especially necessary since Islington was used as a convenient grazing halt for livestock en route to the local Royal Agricultural Hall or nearby Smithfield.
Royal Agricultural hall
The ugly modern glass frontage of the Business Design Centre hides the former Royal Agricultural Hall, Islington’s finest Victorian building, completed in 1862, and known locally as the “Aggie”. As well as hosting agricultural and livestock exhibitions, it used to host the World’s Fair, the Grand Military Tournament, Cruft’s Dog Show and such marvels as Urbini’s performing fleas. During World War II, however, it was requisitioned by the government for use by the Post Office, who remained in residence until 1971. The interior is still magnificent – even if the exhibitions now held there are more prosaic (think packaging conferences and careers fairs) – with the best exterior view from Liverpool Road, where two large brick towers rise up either side of the roof, like a Victorian train station.
Islington Green to Cross Street
Today, Islington has fewer green spaces than any other London borough – one of the few being the minuscule Islington Green, just up from Angel tube. Twice a week (Wed & Sat), the pavements to the east of the green are occupied by the antique stalls of the Camden Passage market, although the antique shops in the market’s narrow namesake and the surrounding streets stay open all week.
Just north of the green stands St Mary’s Church, originally built in the 1750s. Only the steeple survived the Blitz, though the light, spacious 1950s interior is an interesting period piece, with six fluted Egyptian-style columns framing the sanctuary. The churchyard opens out into Dagmar Passage, where in 1961 a former temperance hall was converted into the Little Angel Puppet Theatre. The archway at the end of Dagmar Terrace brings you out onto Cross Street, Islington’s loveliest street, with eighteenth-century houses sloping down to Essex Road and raised pavements on both sides.
THE NEW RIVER
In 1613, Hugh Myddelton (1560–1631), Royal Jeweller to James I, revolutionized London’s water supply by drawing fresh water direct from the River Lee, 38 miles away in Hertfordshire, via an aqueduct known as the New River. A weathered statue of Myddleton, unveiled by Gladstone in 1862, stands at the apex of Islington Green. Right up until the late 1980s the New River continued to supply most of north London with its water – the original termination point was at New River Head, near Sadler’s Wells theatre; the succession of ponds to the northeast of Canonbury Road is a surviving fragment of the scheme; north of Stoke Newington, much of the river remains in situ.
Union Chapel
North of Islington Town Hall, a handsome 1920s Neoclassical Portland-stone building, set back from Upper Street, is the fancifully extravagant Union Chapel. Built in 1888, at the height of the Congregationalists’ popularity, it remains a church, but is now also an innovative independent concert venue. Its lugubrious, spacious, octagonal interior is designed like a giant Gothic auditorium, with raked seating and galleries capable of holding 1650 rapt worshippers (or concert goers) with the pulpit centre stage.
Highbury Fields
At the top of Upper Street lies the largest open space in the entire borough, the modestly sized park of Highbury Fields, where over two hundred thousand people gathered in 1666 to escape (and watch) the Great Fire. Now overlooked on two sides by splendid Georgian and Victorian terraces, and fringed with plane trees, it’s one of Islington’s more elegant green spaces. A plaque on the park’s public toilets commemorates the country’s first-ever gay rights demonstration (against police harassment) which took place here in 1970. Of course Highbury is also world famous as the former home of Arsenal football club, who now play at a modern sixty thousand-seat stadium, ten minutes’ walk away.
Canonbury Square
Islington’s most perfect Regency set piece, Canonbury Square is centred on a smartly maintained flower garden, but blighted by traffic ploughing up Canonbury Road. In 1928, Evelyn Waugh moved into the first floor of no. 17 with his wife Evelyn Gardiner (they called themselves “He-Evelyn” and “She-Evelyn”). In those days, the square was nothing like as salubrious as it is now. In fact, it was precisely the square’s squalor that appealed to George Orwell, who moved into the top floor of no. 27 in 1944, with his wife and son, having been bombed out of his digs in St John’s Wood; he later used it as the prototype for Winston Smith’s home in 1984.
Canonbury Tower
Guided tours contact 020 7359
6888, canonburytower.org.uk
Immediately to the northeast of the square stands the last remaining relic of Islington’s bygone days as a rural retreat, the red-brick Canonbury Tower, originally part of a Tudor mansion built for the prior of St Bartholomew in the City. The very top floor boasts three Elizabethan interiors, with carved oak panelling and fireplaces carved with Freemasonic and Rosicrucian symbols from when the rooms were used by Renaissance man Francis Bacon. The tower is currently looked after by the Canonbury Tower Charitable Trust, who can organize guided tours.
Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art
Canonbury Rd • Wed–Sat 11am–6pm, Sun noon–5pm, first Thurs
of month until 9pm • £5 • 020 7704 9522, estorickcollection.com • _test777 Highbury & Islington
Islington’s most intriguing attraction is the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, which occupies a Georgian mansion on Canonbury Square, with the entrance on Canonbury Road. The most exciting works in the gallery are those of the early Italian Futurists, although their founding manifesto of 1909 urged followers to “divert the canals to flood the museums”! Futurism’s mouthpiece was the fascist Filippo Marinetti, a rich boy with a penchant for crashing fast cars, and, as evidenced by the photos, an eye for natty waistcoats, complete with appliqué hands patting the pockets.
The permanent collection, spread out over the two upper floors, ranges from the rainbow colours of Music by Luigi Russolo (inventor of the intonarumori – a sort of avant-garde hurdy-gurdy), which is firmly Futurist, to a few portraits by Modigliani, and a typically melancholic canvas by Symbolist painter, Giorgio de Chirico. One of the strangest works is Medardo Rosso’s wax sculpture Woman with a Veil, from 1893, which had a profound influence on the Futurists. Other highlights include Giacomo Balla’s Hand of the Violinist, a classic Futurist study of movement, speed and dexterity, and Gino Severini’s Cubist Dancer. The gallery also features paintings by lesser-known Italian artists such as Giorgio Morandi, Massimo Campigli, Mario Sironi and Zoran Music, as well as by Italy’s two leading postwar sculptors, Emilio Greco and Marino Marini. Excellent special exhibitions are held on the lower floors, and there’s a pleasant Italian café that spills out into the back courtyard in good weather.
Hackney
The borough of Hackney stretches from Shoreditch, on the East End edge of the City, to the predominantly Jewish north London suburb of Stamford Hill. One of the most ethnically diverse of all London boroughs, it comes as no surprise that the country’s longest-serving black woman MP, Diane Abbott, has her constituency in Hackney. The fact that the borough has tourist signposts comes as a surprise to many visitors, yet Hackney repays selective visits: Dalston is now at the heart of London’s alternative nightlife; Stoke Newington is a haven of inexpensive restaurants and laidback cafés; and Hackney Central boasts the former music hall of the Hackney Empire, with the red-brick Tudor mansion of Sutton House a short stroll away.
Dalston
Dalston has undergone a seismic transformation, and has now overtaken Shoreditch as London’s hippest, grittiest new quartier. Among the early pioneers was the excellent Vortex Jazz Club, on the frankly quite sleazy Gillett Square, followed by the Arcola Theatre, one of the city’s most dynamic fringe venues, which now occupies a former paint factory on Ashwin Street, next door to the avant-garde music venue Café Oto. This trio has been accompanied by bars and clubs dotted up and down the high street from Dalston Junction. With two Overground stations, and trains capable of whizzing you in all directions, Dalston’s transport has vastly improved, too.
Kingsland High Street
Kingsland High Street had a history of entertainment long before the current crop of clubs and bars came along, with four or five cinemas in close proximity. The lone survivor is the Art Deco Rio Cinema, at no. 107, opened in 1937 as the Dalston Classic, replacing the 1915 Kingsland Empire, and still going strong. Dalston’s other heritage sight is the Shanghai restaurant, which preserves the 1910 decor of tiles, marble and glass from its days as an eel and pie shop, founded in 1862 by the ubiquitous Cooke family.
Ridley road market
Mon–Thurs 6am–6pm, Fri & Sat 6am–7pm • Dalston Kingsland or Dalston Junction Overground
In the immediate postwar period, Dalston was a predominantly Jewish area, and Ridley Road Market (Mon–Sat) was the scene of battles between Mosley’s fascists and Jewish ex-servicemen. The market is still in good health, and an accurate reflection of Dalston’s ethnic diversity, with Cockney fruit and veg stalls, halal butchers, a 24-hour bagel bakery, West Indian grocers and African and Asian fabric shops. A Turkish/Kurdish supermarket marks the eastern end of the market, its railings still displaying the Star of David from its original Jewish occupants.
Stoke Newington
Bus #73 or #476 from Angel or Stoke Newington train station from
Liverpool St
Stoke Newington (or “Stokey”) is probably the most immediately appealing area of Hackney, though like much of the borough, it’s off the tube map. Stokey’s best attribute is Church Street, a more or less franchise-free, former village high street of little independent shops and restaurants.
The whole area was, for several centuries, a haven for Nonconformists (Christians who were not members of the Anglican church), who were denied the right to live in the City. The most famous Dissenter to live in Stokey was Daniel Defoe, who wrote Robinson Crusoe on the corner of what is now Defoe Road and Church Street; his gravestone is displayed in the Hackney Museum – stolen from Bunhill Fields in the 1870s, it was discovered in Southampton in 1940.
THE ANGRY BRIGADE
On August 20, 1971, six alleged members of the Angry Brigade – at the time Britain’s only home-grown urban terrorist group – were arrested at 359 Amhurst Rd, off Stoke Newington High Street, along with (according to the police) a small arsenal of weapons and explosives. The police attempted to link the Angries with the explosives (despite the lack of forensic evidence) and a total of 25 bomb attacks on the homes of Tory politicians and other members of the Establishment, during which one person had been slightly injured. After one of the longest criminal trials in English history, at which two other alleged members were also charged, four of the accused were sent to prison for conspiracy to cause explosions and four were acquitted.
Abney Park Cemetery
Stoke Newington High St • Cemetery
8am to dusk • Visitor Centre
Mon–Fri 10am–4pm • Free • 020 7275 7557, abney-park.org.uk • Stoke Newington train station
When Bunhill Fields became overcrowded, Abney Park Cemetery became the “Campo Santo of English non-Conformists”, in the words of the 1903 brochure. The most famous grave is that of William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, by the Church Street entrance, but the romantically overrun cemetery was originally planted as an A–Z arboretum, and is now an inner-city wildlife reserve (not to mention a gay cruising area). A visitors’ centre is housed in one of the Egyptian-style lodges at the main entrance, on busy Stoke Newington High Street.
Clissold Park
Stoke Newington Church St • Daily 7.30am–dusk • Free • 020 7923 3660, hackney.gov.uk • Stoke Newington train station
Stoke Newington’s two main churches, both dedicated to St Mary, stand either side of Church Street and reflect the changes wrought on the area in the last couple of centuries: the sixteenth-century village church firmly in the shadow of the more urbane structure built by George Gilbert Scott in the 1850s, with a spire that outreached all others in London in its day. This pair marks the entrance to Clissold Park, founded in 1889 and centred on a porticoed mansion built in the 1790s as a country house for the Quaker Hoare banking family, now beautifully restored and housing the park café. The duck and terrapin pond in front was once part of the New River; elsewhere are goats, deer, a small aviary and a butterfly tunnel.
Stamford Hill
In the northern tip of Hackney, Stamford Hill is home to a tight-knit, mostly Yiddish-speaking, community of Hasidic Jews, one of the borough’s oldest immigrant populations. The most visually striking aspect of this ultra-Orthodox community is the men’s attire – frock coats, white stockings and elaborate headgear – which derives from that worn by the Polish nobility of the period. The shops on Stamford Hill and Dunsmure Road, running west, are where the Hasidim buy their kosher goods.
Springfield Park
Springfield • Daily 7.30am–dusk • Free • 020 8356 8428, hackney.gov.uk • Stamford Hill train station
On Sundays, large numbers of Hasidic families take the air at Springfield Park, opened in 1905 “to change
the habits of the people and to keep them out of the public houses”. The
park boasts an awesome view east across the Lee Valley to the adjacent
Walthamstow Marshes, a valuable
stretch of wetland that’s alive with butterflies and warblers in the
summer. The park also has a decent café ( springfieldparkcafe.co.uk) in the White Lodge Mansion by the
pond.
To reach Springfield Park from Stamford Hill, walk across Clapton Common, and down Spring Hill. En route, check out the four winged beasts (characters from the Book of Revelation) at the base of the spire of the Cathedral Church of the Good Shepherd on the corner of Rookwood Road, built for the sect of Spiritual Free Lovers, the Agapemonites, in 1892. Six thousand gathered outside here in 1902 to throw rotten tomatoes at the womanizing vicar, who had declared himself the Second Messiah, and drive him into Clapton Pond to see if he could walk on water.
Middlesex Filter Beds
Sat & Sun: Easter–Sept 10am–6pm; Oct–Easter 10am–4pm; summer holidays also Mon–Fri 10am–5pm • Free • Clapton train station
If you follow the River Lee south of Walthamstow Marshes, you will eventually reach the Middlesex Filter Beds, originally built in 1852 on the south side of Lea Bridge Road. Closed in 1969 and mostly drained, the filter beds now serve as a nature reserve – in the spring check out the noisy frogs in the pond by the main culvert. To the south of the filter beds lie the Hackney Marshes, best known as the venue for Sunday League football matches, beyond which is the 2012 Olympic Park.
Hackney Central
The old parish of Hackney was originally centred around the dumpy fifteenth-century tower of the former parish church of St Augustine, and next to it, the Old Town Hall, built in 1802 (now a betting shop). At this point, Mare Street is still discernably a village high street, and is known, for obvious reasons, as the Narroway. The modern borough has its headquarters further south on Mare Street around Hackney Town Hall, built in a very restrained 1930s Art Deco style and set back from the high street. Close by is the ornate terracotta Hackney Empire, one of the last surviving music halls in London, built in typically extravagant style by Frank Matcham in 1899.
Hackney Museum
1 Reading Lane • Tues, Wed & Fri 9.30am–5.30pm, Thurs
9.30am–8pm, Sat 10am–5pm • Free • 020 8356 3500, hackney.gov.uk • Hackney Central Overground
Beside the town hall stands the borough’s new library and the Hackney Museum. As well as excellent temporary exhibitions, the museum has an interesting permanent display with lots of personal accounts from local residents. Specific exhibits to look out for include the “upside-down” map of the borough and the Saxon log boat found in Springfield Park, thought to have been a ferry for taking folk across the River Lee.
Sutton House
2–4 Homerton High St • Feb to mid-Dec Thurs & Fri
10.30am–5pm, Sat & Sun noon–5pm; daily during school Easter
& summer holidays • NT • £3.50 • 020 8986 2264, nationaltrust.org.uk • Hackney Central Overground
Hidden away, at the east end of the Georgian terrace of Sutton Place, stands Sutton House. Built in 1535 for Ralph Sadleir, a rising star at the court of Henry VIII, the house takes its name from Thomas Sutton, founder of Charterhouse, who lived in an adjacent building (he is buried at Charterhouse, minus his entrails, which you’ve probably just walked over in the graveyard by Mare Street). The National Trust have done their best to adapt to unfamiliar surroundings and have preserved not just the exquisite Elizabethan “linenfold” wooden panelling, but also a mural left by squatters in 1986. In addition to showing its rambling complex of period rooms, the house puts on classical concerts, hosts contemporary art exhibitions and even runs a tearoom.
Walthamstow
East of the River Lee and the marshes, the chief reason to head out to Walthamstow is to visit the William Morris Gallery, but there are one or two other points of interest in the district. Walthamstow Market (Mon–Sat) stretches for almost a mile along the old High Street, north of the tube station, and claims to be the country’s longest street market. For a traditional East End snack, head for Manzes, at no. 76, one of London’s finest pie-and-mash shops, with its traditional tiled walls and ceiling.
Vestry House Museum
2 Vestry Rd • Wed–Sun 10am–5pm • Free • 020 8496 4391, walthamforest.gov.uk • _test777 Walthamstow Central
At the peaceful heart of the old village of Walthamstow is the Vestry House Museum, built in 1730 and at one time the village workhouse. Later on, it became the police station, and a reconstructed police cell from 1861 is one of the museum’s chief exhibits. Pride of place, however, goes to the tiny Bremer car, Britain’s first-ever petrol-driven automobile, designed in 1892 by local engineer Fred Bremer, 20-year-old son of German immigrants. Victorian times are comprehensively covered, while the temporary exhibitions tend to focus on contemporary topics. The other point of interest nearby is the fifteenth-century half-timbered Ancient House, a short walk up Church Lane.
Civic Centre
Walthamstow’s Civic Centre is an arresting sight, set back from Forest Road around a huge open courtyard. Designed in an unusual 1930s Scandinavian style, it is, without doubt, London’s grandest town-hall complex. Indeed, there’s a touch of Stalinism about the severe Neoclassical central portico and in the William Morris-inspired exhortation above the adjacent Assembly Hall: “Fellowship is life and the lack of fellowship is death.” Sadly, construction of the law courts that would have completed the ensemble was interrupted by the war, but this remains one of the most startling public buildings in London.
William Morris Gallery
Forest Rd • Wed–Sun 10am–5pm • Free • 020 8496 4390, wmgallery.org.uk • _test777 Walthamstow Central
The William Morris Gallery is housed in a lovely Georgian mansion with two big bay windows. This was the Morris family home from 1848, following the death of Morris’s father, a wealthy businessman in the City, the previous year. The gallery has benefitted from a total refurb, and is now a very attractive museum (and café) to visit.
Ground floor displays tell the story of Morris’s early life and business projects, accompanied by examples of his first wallpaper design (a rose trellis), a lovely oak settle and some glorious De Morgan animal tiles for a nursery. Upstairs, there are “Brownies” (fairies) in stained glass, and beautiful first editions from the Kelmscott Press, souvenirs from Iceland and the modest leather satchel he took everywhere with him. The contradiction between his rich clients and his socialist ideals is touched upon, and there’s a copy of the anti-war song he wrote in 1878. There’s also a whole room devoted to Frank Brangwyn, who trained at Morris & Co and was something of a jack-of-all-trades like Morris.
WILLIAM MORRIS
Poet, artist, designer and socialist, William Morris (1834–96) was one of the most fascinating characters of Victorian London. Closely associated with both the Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts movements, he set up Morris & Co, whose work covered all areas of applied art: glasswork, tiles, metalwork, furniture, calligraphy, carpets, book illumination and (perhaps most famously) wallpaper. As well as being a successful capitalist – the company’s flagship store was on Mayfair’s Hanover Square – Morris also became one of the leading political figures of his day, active in the Socialist League with Eleanor Marx, and publishing several utopian tracts, most famously News from Nowhere, in which he suggested that the Houses of Parliament be used as “a storage place for manure” (you can buy a copy in the William Morris Gallery bookshop). If you like your WM, you can see more of his work elsewhere in London: at the V&A, Holy Trinity Church and the Red House.
Hampstead
Perched on a hill to the west of Hampstead Heath, Hampstead village developed into a fashionable spa in the eighteenth century, and was not much altered thereafter. Its sloping site, which deterred Victorian property speculators and put off the railway companies, saved much of the Georgian village from destruction. Later, it became one of the city’s most celebrated literary quartiers and even now it retains its reputation as a bolt hole of the high-profile intelligentsia and discerning pop stars. You can get some idea of its tone from the fact that the local Labour MP for many years was the actress Glenda Jackson.
The steeply inclined High Street, lined with trendy shops and arty cafés, flaunts the area’s ever-increasing wealth without completely losing its charm, though the most appealing area is the extensive, picturesque and precipitous network of alleyways, steps and streets east and west of Heath Street. Proximity to Hampstead Heath is, of course, the real joy of the area, for this mixture of woodland, smooth pasture and landscaped garden is quite simply the most exhilarating patch of greenery in London.
HAMPSTEAD WHO’S WHO
Over the years, countless writers, artists and politicos have been drawn to Hampstead, which has more blue plaques commemorating its residents than any other London borough. John Constable lived here in the 1820s, trying to make ends meet for his wife and seven children and painting cloud formations on the Heath, several of which hang in the V&A. John Keats moved into Well Walk in 1817, to nurse his dying brother, then moved to a semi-detached villa, fell in love with the girl next door, bumped into Coleridge on the Heath and in 1821 went to Rome to die; the villa is now a museum (see Keats’ House). In 1856, Karl Marx finally achieved bourgeois respectability when he moved into Grafton Terrace, a new house on the south side of the Heath. Robert Louis Stevenson stayed here when he was 23 suffering from tuberculosis, and thought it “the most delightful place for air and scenery”.
Author H.G. Wells lived on Church Row for three years just before World War I. In the same period, the photographer Cecil Beaton was attending a local infants’ school, and was bullied there by author Evelyn Waugh – the start of a lifelong feud. The composer Edward Elgar, who lived locally, became a special constable during the war, joining the Hampstead Volunteer Reserve. D.H. Lawrence, and his German wife Frieda, watched the first major Zeppelin raid on London from the Heath in 1915 and decided to leave. Following the war, Lawrence’s friend and fellow writer, Katherine Mansfield, lived for a couple of years in a big grey house overlooking the Heath, which she nicknamed “The Elephant”. Actor Dirk Bogarde was born in a taxi in Hampstead in 1921. Stephen Spender spent his childhood in “an ugly house” on Frognal, and went to school locally. Elizabeth Taylor was born in Hampstead in 1932, and came back to live here in the 1950s during her first marriage to Richard Burton.
In the 1930s, Hampstead’s modernist Isokon Flats, on Lawn Road, became something of an artistic hangout, particularly its drinking den, the Isobar: architect Walter Gropius, and artists Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and his wife Barbara Hepworth all lived here (Moore moved out in 1940, when his studio was bombed, and retired to Herefordshire); another tenant, Agatha Christie, compared the exterior to a giant ocean liner. Architect Ernö Goldfinger built his modernist family home at 2 Willow Rd, now a museum, and local resident Ian Fleming named James Bond’s adversary after him. Mohammed Ali Jinnah abandoned India for Hampstead in 1932, living a quiet life with his daughter and sister, and working as a lawyer. George Orwell lived rent-free above Booklovers’ Corner, a bookshop on South End Road, in 1934, in return for services in the shop in the afternoon; Keep the Aspidistra Flying has many echoes of Hampstead and its characters. Sigmund Freud spent the last year of his life in Hampstead, having reluctantly left Austria, following the Nazi Anschluss; his house is now a museum. Artist Piet Mondrian also escaped to Hampstead from Nazi-occupied Paris, only to be bombed out a year later, after which he fled to New York. Nobel Prize-winning writer Elias Canetti was another refugee from Nazi-occupied Europe, as was Oskar Kokoschka who, along with photomontage artist John Heartfield, was given assistance by the Hampstead-based Artists Refugee Committee, set up by local Surrealist artist, Roland Penrose. General de Gaulle lived on Frognal with his wife and two daughters and got some first-hand experience of Nazi air raids.
Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain in 1955, shot her lover outside the Magdala Tavern by Hampstead Heath train station. Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten lived in a squat on Hampstead High Street in 1976. John le Carré lived here in the 1980s and 1990s and set a murder in Smiley’s People on Hampstead Heath. Michael Foot, the former Labour leader, lived in a house he bought in 1945 with his redundancy cheque from The Evening Standard until the age of 96. Actors Hugh Grant and Stephen Fry, writer Doris Lessing and pop stars Robbie Williams and George Michael have homes here.
Holly Bush Hill
If you wander into the backstreets north of Hampstead tube, you will probably end up at the small triangular green on Holly Bush Hill, where the white weatherboarded Romney House stands (closed to the public). In 1797, painter George Romney converted the house and stables into London’s first purpose-built artist’s studio house, though he spent only two years here before returning to the Lake District and the wife he had abandoned thirty years earlier. Later, it served as Hampstead’s Assembly Rooms, where Constable used to lecture on landscape painting. Several houses are set grandly behind wrought-iron gates, on the north side of the green, including the late seventeenth-century Fenton House.
Fenton House
Hampstead Grove • March–Oct Wed–Sun 11am–5pm • NT • House £6.50; garden only £2 • 020 7435 3471, nationaltrust.org.uk • _test777 Hampstead
All three floors of Fenton House are decorated in the eighteenth-century taste and currently house a collection of European and Oriental ceramics bequeathed by the house’s last private owner, Lady Binning. The house also contains a smattering of British twentieth-century paintings by the likes of Walter Sickert, Duncan Grant and Spencer Gore, plus a superb collection of early musical instruments – all displayed on the top floor, from which you can see right across London. Among the many spinets, virginals and clavichords is an early Broadwood grand piano and an Unverdorben lute from 1580 (one of only three in the world). Experienced keyboard players are occasionally let loose on some of the instruments during the day; concerts also take place (book in advance); alternatively, look out for one of the regular demonstration tours. Tickets for the house also allow you to take a stroll in the beautiful terraced garden, with an orchard, a kitchen garden and a formal garden, featuring some top-class topiary and herbaceous borders.
Admiral’s House
Up Hampstead Grove, beyond Fenton House, is Admiral’s Walk, so-called after its most famous building, Admiral’s House, a whitewashed Georgian mansion with nautical excrescences. Once painted by Constable, it was later lived in by Victorian architect George Gilbert Scott, of Albert Memorial fame. Until his death in 1933 John Galsworthy lived in the adjacent cottage, Grove Lodge – “[it] wasn’t cheap, I can tell you”, he wrote to a friend on arrival – where he completed The Forsyte Saga and received the 1932 Nobel Prize, which was presented to him here since he was too ill to travel abroad. Opposite is The Mount, a gently sloping street descending to Heath Street, which has changed little since it was depicted in Work by Pre-Raphaelite artist (and local resident) Ford Madox Brown.
St John-at-Hampstead
Church Row • Daily 9am–5pm • Free • 020 7794 5808, hampsteadparishchurch.org.uk • _test777 Hampstead
The Georgian terraces of tree-centred Church Row, at the south end of Heath Street, are where City gents would stay for the week when Hampstead was a thriving spa. The street forms a grand approach to St John-at-Hampstead, which has an attractive period-piece Georgian interior and a romantically overgrown cemetery. The chest-tomb of the clockmaker John Harrison lies in the churchyard; John Constable is buried in the southeastern corner; Hugh Gaitskill, Labour Party leader from 1955 to 1963, lies in the Churchyard Extension to the northeast. If you continue up Holly Walk, you’ll come to St Mary’s Church, whose Italianate facade is squeezed into the middle of a row of three-storey cottages. This was one of the first Catholic churches built in London after the Reformation, and the original facade from 1816 was much less conspicuous.
Hampstead Cemetery
Fortune Green Rd • Mon–Fri 7.30am–dusk, Sat 9am–dusk, Sun
10am–dusk • Free • _test777 Hampstead or Finchley Road & Frognal
Overground
A good selection of Hampstead luminaries are buried in the neatly maintained Hampstead Cemetery, half a mile west of central Hampstead, on the west side of Finchley Road, and founded in 1876 when St John’s Churchyard Extension was full. The pioneer of antiseptic surgery Joseph Lister, music-hall star Marie Lloyd and children’s book illustrator Kate Greenaway are among those buried here. The full-size stone organ monument to the obscure Charles Barritt is the most unusual piece of funerary art, while the most unlikely occupant is Grand Duke Mikhail Mikhailovitch, uncle to the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II.
Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens • Wed–Sun noon–5pm • £6 • 020 7435 2002, freud.org.uk • _test777 Finchley Road
One of the most poignant of London’s house museums is the Freud Museum in the leafy suburban streets of south Hampstead. Having fled Vienna after the Anschluss, Sigmund Freud arrived in London in the summer of 1938, and was immediately Britain’s most famous Nazi exile. He had been diagnosed as having cancer way back in 1923 (he was an inveterate cigar-smoker) and given just five years to live. He lasted sixteen, but was a semi-invalid when he arrived in London, and rarely left the house except to visit his pet dog, Chun, who was held in quarantine for nearly a year. On September 21, 1939, Freud’s doctor fulfilled their secret pact and gave his patient a lethal dose of morphine.
The ground-floor study and library look exactly as they did when Freud lived here (they are modelled on his flat in Vienna); the large collection of antiquities and the psychiatrist’s couch, sumptuously draped in opulent Persian carpets, were all brought here from Vienna in 1938. Upstairs, where the Freud archive now resides, there’s some old footage of the family, while another room is dedicated to his favourite daughter, Anna, herself an influential child analyst, who lived in the house until her death in 1982. Sigmund’s architect son, Ernst, designed a loggia at the back of the house so that Freud could sit out and enjoy the garden; it has since been enclosed and serves as the museum shop, which flogs Freudian merchandise such as a “Brainy Beanie” – Freud himself as a cuddly toy – and stocks a superb range of books.
Burgh House
New End Square • Wed–Fri & Sun noon–5pm; Sat café
only • Free • 020 7431 0144, burghhouse.org.uk • _test777 Hampstead
The Queen Anne mansion of Burgh House dates from Hampstead’s halcyon days as a spa, known briefly as Hampstead Wells, and was at one time occupied by Dr Gibbons, the physician who discovered the spring’s medicinal qualities. The house hosts art exhibitions and its attractive wood-panelled Music Room is a popular wedding venue. Upstairs, there’s a modest museum, telling the history of Hampstead. The museum’s most prized possessions are the modernist Isokon plywood stacking tables and a long chair by Marcel Breuer, found in a Hampstead skip by a local councillor. The Buttery café in the basement has outdoor seating in the summer on a lovely terrace.
2 Willow Road
March–Oct Wed–Sun 11am–5pm; note that before 3pm, visits are by hourly guided tour • NT • £6 • 020 7435 6166, nationaltrust.org.uk • _test777 Hampstead
Hampstead’s most unusual sight is 2 Willow Road, the central house in a modernist red-brick terrace, built in the 1930s by the Budapest-born architect Ernö Goldfinger, best known for his concrete brutalist high-rises, such as Trellick Tower. Completed in 1939, this was a state-of-the-art house at the time, its open-plan rooms flooded with natural light and much of the furniture designed by Goldfinger himself. The family home for fifty years, the Goldfingers changed very little in the house, so what you see is a 1930s avant-garde dwelling preserved in aspic, a house at once both modern and old-fashioned. An added bonus is that the rooms are packed with the Goldfingers’ extensive art collection: Surrealist objets trouvés and works of art by the likes of Léger, Duchamp, Max Ernst, Henry Moore and Man Ray.
Keats’ House
Keats Grove • March–Oct Tues–Sun 1–5pm; Nov–Feb Fri–Sun
1–5pm • £5 • 020 7332 3868, cityoflondon.gov.uk • _test777 Hampstead
Hampstead’s most lustrous figure is celebrated at Keats’ House, an elegant, whitewashed Regency double villa. The consumptive poet lodged here with his friend Charles Brown, in 1818, after his brother Tom had died of the same illness. Inspired by the peacefulness of Hampstead, and by his passion for girl-next-door Fanny Brawne (whose house is also part of the museum), Keats wrote some of his most famous works here before leaving for Rome, where he died in 1821 at the age of just 25.
In the pretty front garden, as you approach the house, a diminutive plum tree stands on the site of the much larger specimen in whose shade Keats is said to have sat for two or three hours before composing Ode to a Nightingale. The simple interior contains books and letters, an anatomical notebook from Keats’ days as a medical student at Guy’s Hospital, Fanny’s engagement ring and the four-poster bed in which the poet first coughed up blood, and proclaimed “that drop of blood is my death warrant”. There are regular events – poetry readings, performances and talks – so check the website.
Hampstead Heath
• cityoflondon.gov.uk • _test777 Hampstead or Hampstead Heath and Gospel Oak
Overground
Hampstead Heath, north London’s “green lung”, is the city’s most enjoyable public park. Little of the original heathland survives, but the Heath nevertheless packs in a wonderful variety of bucolic scenery, from the formal Hill Garden and rolling green pastures of Parliament Hill to the dense woodland of West Heath and the landscaped grounds of Kenwood. As it is, the Heath was lucky to survive the nineteenth century intact, for it endured more than forty years of campaigning by the Lord of the Manor, Thomas Maryon Wilson, who introduced no fewer than fifteen parliamentary bills in an attempt to build over it. It wasn’t until after Wilson’s death in 1871 that 220 acres of the Heath passed into public ownership. The Heath now covers over eight hundred acres, and is run by the Corporation of London.
POND DIPPING
The Heath is the source of several of London’s lost rivers – the Tyburn, the Westbourne and the Fleet – and home to some 28 natural ponds, three of which are used as Bathing Ponds, all of which are very popular in good weather: the single-sex men’s and ladies’ ponds, on the Highgate side are open all year; mixed bathing on the Hampstead side in the summer only.
Parliament Hill
Parliament Hill, the Heath’s southernmost ridge, is perhaps better known as Kite Hill, since this is north London’s premier spot for kite flying, especially busy at weekends when some serious equipment takes to the air. The parliamentary connection is much disputed by historians, so take your pick: a Saxon parliament met here; Guy Fawkes’ cronies gathered here (in vain) to watch the Houses of Parliament burn; the Parliamentarians placed cannon here during the Civil War to defend London against the Royalists; and the Middlesex parliamentary elections took place here in the seventeenth century. Whatever the reason for the name, the view over London is unrivalled.
Boudicca’s Mound to Viaduct Pond
To the northwest of Parliament Hill is a fenced-off tumulus, known as Boudicca’s Mound, where, according to tradition, Queen Boudicca was buried after she and ten thousand other Brits had been massacred at Battle Bridge; another legend says she’s buried under Platform 10 in King’s Cross Station. Due west lies the picturesque Viaduct Pond, named after its red-brick bridge, which is also known as Wilson’s Folly. It was built as part of Thomas Maryon Wilson’s abortive plans to drive an access road through the middle of the Heath to his projected estate of 28 villas.
Vale of Health
To the west of Viaduct Pond, an isolated network of streets nestles in the Vale of Health, an area that was, in fact, a malarial swamp until the late eighteenth century. Literary lion Leigh Hunt moved to this quiet backwater in 1816, after serving a two-year prison sentence for calling the Prince Regent “a fat Adonis of fifty”, among other things; Hunt was instrumental in persuading Keats to give up medicine for poetry. Other artistic residents have included Nobel Prize-winner Rabindranath Tagore, who lived here in 1912, and painter Stanley Spencer, who stayed here with the Carline family and married their daughter Hilda in the 1920s. Author D.H. Lawrence spent a brief, unhappy period here in 1915: in September of that year his novel The Rainbow was banned for obscenity, and by December, Lawrence and his wife, Frieda von Richthofen, whose German origins were causing the couple immense problems with the authorities, had resolved to leave the country.
West Heath
Northwest of the Vale of Health is the busy road junction around Whitestone Pond, which marks the highest point in this part of north London (440ft), overlooked by the faux-ancient Jack Straw’s Castle pub. To the west lies West Heath, a densely wooded, boggy area with a thick canopy of deciduous trees sloping down towards Childs Hill; it’s a very peaceful place for a stroll and a popular gay cruising area. A track leads northwest from Jack Straw’s Castle, across West Heath, over to Hill Garden (daily 8.30am to dusk), the Heath’s most secretive and romantic little gem. Originally an extension to the grounds of nearby Hill House, built by Lord Leverhulme in 1906 (and now converted into flats), the garden’s most startling feature is the 800ft-long zigzag Pergola, whose Doric columns support a host of climbers including a wonderfully gnarled wisteria. The pergola is elevated some 15ft above the ground in order to traverse a public footpath that Lord Leverhulme tried in vain to have removed.
Golders Hill Park
West Heath Ave • Daily 7.30am–dusk • Free • _test777 Golders Green
Adjacent to the West Heath are the landscaped gardens of Golders Hill Park. Near the main entrance is the park café, serving delicious Italian ice cream, courtesy of Arte Gelato, and close by, a beautifully kept walled garden and pond. The central section of the park is taken up by a zoo containing alpacas, red-legged seriemas, ring-tailed lemurs, and a series of impeccably maintained aviaries, home to white-naped cranes and other exotic birds.
Kenwood
Gardens Daily summer 8am–8pm; winter
8am–4pm • Free • House Daily 10am–5pm • Free • 020 8348 1286, english-heritage.org.uk • Bus #210 from Archway or Golders Green
Hampstead Heath’s most celebrated sight is Kenwood, the former private estate whose beautiful off-white Neoclassical mansion faces south to catch the sun. The house dates from the seventeenth century, but was later remodelled by Robert Adam for the Earl of Mansfield, the most powerful jurist in the country. Mansfield, who sent 102 people to the gallows and sentenced another 448 to transportation, was a deeply unpopular character and one of the prime targets of the 1780 Gordon Riots. Having ransacked his Bloomsbury house, a mob headed for Kenwood, but were waylaid by the canny landlord of the nearby Spaniards Inn (an ex-butler of Mansfield’s), who plied them with free drink until soldiers arrived to disperse them.
Nowadays, with its free art collection and magnificently landscaped grounds, Kenwood is a deservedly popular spot. The gardens, to the west of the house, boast splendid azaleas and rhododendrons; to the south, a huge grassy amphitheatre slopes down to a lake. The whole area is something of a suntrap and a favourite picnic spot, while the provision-less can head for the excellent Brew House Café in the old coachhouse.
Kenwood House
The house is now home to a superb seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art collection from the English, Dutch and French schools. First off, head for the Dining Room, where a superb late self-portrait by Rembrandt shares space with marvellous portraits by Franz Hals, Van Dyck and Ferdinand Bols, and Vermeer’s delicate Guitar Player. Of the house’s many wonderful period interiors, the most spectacular is Adam’s sky-blue and gold Library, its book-filled apses separated from the central area by paired columns. The pièce de résistance is the tunnel-vaulted ceiling, decorated by Antonio Zucchi, who fell in love with and married Kenwood’s other ceiling painter, Angelica Kauffmann.
Upstairs, you’ll find more paintings, including William Larkin’s full-length portraits, possibly of a Jacobean wedding party, the arrogant Richard Sackville, a dissolute aristocrat resplendent in pompom shoes, and his much nicer brother, Edward, sporting earrings festooned with ribbons. Don’t miss the room of shoe buckles, jewellery and portrait miniatures donated by local collectors. Back downstairs in the Music Room, are more masterful portraits by Gainsborough, most strikingly the diaphanous Countess Howe, caught up in a bold, almost abstract landscape, plus several by Reynolds, including his whimsical Venus Chiding Cupid for Learning to Cast Accounts.
Highgate
Northeast of Hampstead Heath, and fractionally lower than Hampstead (appearances notwithstanding), Highgate lacks the literary cachet of Hampstead, but makes up for it with London’s most famous cemetery, resting place of, among others, Karl Marx. It also retains more of its village origins, especially around The Grove, Highgate’s finest row of houses, set back from the road in pairs overlooking the village green, and dating back to 1685. Their most famous one-time resident, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, lived at no. 3 from 1816, with a certain Dr Gillman and his wife. With Gillman’s help, Coleridge got his opium addiction under control and enjoyed the healthiest, if not necessarily the happiest, period of his life, until his death here in 1834.
Coleridge was initially buried in the local college chapel, but in 1961 his remains were reburied in St Michael’s Church, in South Grove. Its spire is a landmark, but St Michael’s is much less interesting architecturally than the grandiose, late seventeenth-century Old Hall next door, or the two tiny ramshackle cottages opposite, built for the servants of one of the luxurious mansions that once characterized Highgate. Arundel House, which stood on the site of the Old Hall, was where Francis Bacon, the Renaissance philosopher and statesman, is thought to have died, having caught a chill while trying to stuff a chicken full of ice for an early experiment in refrigeration.
Highgate High Street
Highgate gets its name from the tollgate – the highest in London and the oldest in the country – that stood where the Gatehouse pub now stands on Highgate High Street. The High Street itself, though architecturally pleasing, is packed out with franchises and estate agents, and marred by heavy traffic, as is its northern extension, North Road. If you persevere with North Road, however, you’ll pass Highgate School, founded in 1565 for the local poor but long since established as an exclusive fee-paying public school, housed in suitably impressive Victorian buildings. T.S. Eliot was a master here for a while, and famous poetical alumni, known as Cholmeleians after the founder Sir Roger Cholmeley, include Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Betjeman.
Highpoint 1 and 2
At the top end of North Road, on the left, are the whitewashed high-rises of Highpoint 1 and 2, seminal early essays in modernist architecture designed by Berthold Lubetkin and his Tecton partnership from the late 1930s. Highpoint 1, the northernmost of the two blocks, was conceived as workers’ housing, with communal roof terraces and a tearoom. The locals were outraged so Highpoint 2 ended up being luxury apartments, the caryatids at the entrance a joke at the expense of his anti-modernist critics. Lubetkin also designed himself a penthouse apartment on the roof in the style of a Georgian dacha, with views right across London, where he lived until 1955.
Waterlow Park and Lauderdale House
Park Daily dawn to dusk • Free • waterlowpark.org.uk • Lauderdale House
Wed–Fri 11am–4pm, Sat 1.30–5pm, Sun
10am–5pm • Free • Café Tues–Sun 9am–5pm • 020 8348 8716, lauderdalehouse.org.uk • _test777 Archway
To the west of Highgate Hill lies Waterlow Park, named after Sydney Waterlow, who donated it in 1889 as “a garden for the gardenless”. Waterlow also bequeathed Lauderdale House, a much-altered sixteenth-century building, on the eastern edge of the park, which is thought to have been occupied at one time by Nell Gwynne and her infant son. The house stages live performances, puts on art exhibitions and is also home to a decent café that spills out into the terraced gardens. The park itself, occupying a dramatic sloping site, to the west, is an amalgamation of several house gardens, and is one of London’s finest landscaped parks, providing a through route to Highgate Cemetery. Not far from the park, down Highgate Hill, you’ll find the Whittington Stone, with cat, marking the spot where Dick Whittington miraculously heard the Bow Bells chime.
Highgate Cemetery
Swain’s Lane • East Cemetery
April–Oct Mon–Fri 10am–5pm, Sat & Sun
11am–5pm; Nov–March closes 4pm • £4Guided tour Sat 2pm; £8 • West Cemetery
Guided tours March–Nov Mon–Fri 1.45pm,
Sat & Sun hourly 11am–4pm; Dec–Feb Sat & Sun hourly
11am–3pm; • £12; No under-8s • 020 8340 1834, highgatecemetery.org • _test777 Archway
Ranged on both sides of Swain’s Lane and receiving far more visitors than Highgate itself, Highgate Cemetery is London’s most famous graveyard. Opened in 1839, it quickly became the preferred resting place of wealthy Victorian families, who could rub shoulders with numerous intellectuals and artists. As long as prime plots were available, business was good and as many as 28 gardeners were employed to beautify the place.
But as the plots filled, funds dried up and the place fell prey to vandalism. The cemetery, which had provided inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, found itself at the centre of a series of bizarre incidents in the early 1970s. Graves were smashed open, cadavers strewn about, and the High Priest of the British Occult Society, Allan Farrant, was arrested, armed with a stake and crucifix with which he hoped to destroy “the Highgate Vampire”. He was eventually sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, after being found guilty of damaging graves, interfering with corpses and sending death-spell dolls to two policemen.
In 1975, the old (west) cemetery was closed completely and was taken under the wing of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery. Nowadays, you have to take a guided tour to visit the West Cemetery, though you can still wander freely in the less dramatic east cemetery – both sections have entrance charges.
West Cemetery
The old, overgrown West Cemetery is the ultimate Hammer-horror graveyard, and one of London’s most impressive sights. It may not have a celebrity corpse to compete with Karl Marx (in the East Cemetery), but wins hands down when it comes to atmosphere, with its huge vaults and eerie statuary. The most famous names here are Chubb (of the locks), Cruft (of the Dog Show) and scientist Michael Faraday, who, as a member of the Sandemanian sect, is buried along the unconsecrated north wall.
All tours are different, but you’re quite likely to be shown the lion that snoozes above the tomb of menagerist George Wombwell, and the faithful dog (confusingly called Lion) that lies on bare-knuckle fighter Thomas Sayers’ grave. Another popular sight is the Rossetti family tomb, resting place of Elizabeth Siddall, Pre-Raphaelite model and wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who buried the only copy of his love poems along with her. Seven years later he changed his mind and had the poems exhumed and published. The poet Christina Rossetti, Dante’s sister, is also buried in the vault.
The cemetery’s spookiest section is around Egyptian Avenue, entered through an archway flanked by Egyptian half-pillars, known as the “Gateway to the City of the Dead”. The avenue slopes gently upwards to the Circle of Lebanon, at the centre of which rises a giant cedar. The circular Egyptian-style sunken catacombs here include the tomb of the lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall (her lover, Mabel Batten, is also buried here). Above are the Terrace Catacombs, and the cemetery’s most ostentatious mausoleums, some of which hold up to fifteen coffins; the largest – based on the tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus – is that of Julius Beer, one-time owner of the Observer newspaper.
East Cemetery
What the East Cemetery lacks in atmosphere, it makes up for by the fact that you can wander at will through its maze of circuitous paths. The most publicized occupant is Karl Marx who spent more than half his life in London, much of it in bourgeois Hampstead. Marx asked for a simple grave topped by a headstone, but by 1954 the Communist movement decided to move his tomb to a more prominent position and erect the vulgar bronze bust that now surmounts a granite plinth bearing the words “Workers of all lands, unite”, from The Communist Manifesto. He has been visited here by Khrushchev, Brezhnev and just about every postwar Communist leader in the world.
Buried along with Marx are his grandson, wife and housekeeper, Helene Delmuth, whom he got pregnant. Engels accepted paternity to avoid a bourgeois scandal and only told Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, on his deathbed in 1895. Eleanor committed suicide a few years later after discovering her common-law husband had secretly married someone else. Her ashes were finally placed in the family vault in 1954, having been seized from the Communist Party headquarters in London by the police in 1921. Lesser-known Communists such as Yusef Mohamed Dadoo, chairman of the South African Communist Party until his death in 1983, cluster around Marx. Not far away is George Eliot’s grave and, behind it, that of her lover, George Henry Lewes.
Alexandra Palace
Alexandra Palace Way • 020 8365 2121, alexandrapalace.com • Bus #W3 from Alexandra Palace train station or
walk from Wood Green
Built in 1873 on North London’s commanding heights of Muswell Hill, Alexandra Palace is London’s only surviving example of a Victorian “People’s Palace”, since its more famous rival, Crystal Palace, burnt down in 1936. However, the history of “Ally Pally” is almost as tragic as that of Crystal Palace. Sixteen days after the official opening, the place burnt down and, despite being rebuilt within two years and boasting a theatre, a reading room, an exhibition hall and a concert room with one of the world’s largest organs, it was a commercial failure. During World War I more than seventeen thousand German POWs passed through its gates, and in 1936 the world’s first television transmission took place here. It was the venue for the International Times’ “14 Hour Technicolour Dream” in 1967, which featured performances by, among others, Pink Floyd and Soft Machine. The palace was rebuilt again after another devastating fire in 1980, and there are plans afoot to restore the Victorian theatre and BBC studios for visitors. Meanwhile, the annual round of shows and gigs continues, and there’s a pub – appropriately named Phoenix Bar – with great views, an indoor ice rink, a boating lake, a pitch and putt course and a garden centre, as well as regular funfairs.
Golders Green
If the East End is the spiritual home of working-class Jews, Golders Green and the suburbs to the northwest of Hampstead, are its middle-class equivalent. A hundred years ago this whole area was open countryside but, like much of suburbia, it was transformed overnight by the arrival of the tube in 1907. Before and after World War II, the area was heavily colonized by Jews moving out of the old East End ghetto around Spitalfields or fleeing as refugees from the Nazis. Nowadays, Golders Green, along with Stamford Hill, is one of the most distinctively Jewish areas in London. The Orthodox community has a particularly strong presence here and there’s a profusion of kosher shops beyond the railway bridge on Golders Green Road, at their busiest on Sundays.
Hampstead Garden Suburb
• hgs.org.uk • _test777 Golders Green
Much of Golders Green is architecturally bland, the one exception being Hampstead Garden Suburb, begun in 1907. This model housing development was the Utopian dream of Henrietta Barnett, who believed the key to social reform was to create a mixed social environment where “the poor shall teach the rich, and the rich, let us hope, shall help the poor to help themselves”. Yet from the start the suburb was socially segregated, with artisan dwellings to the north, middle-class houses to the west and the wealthiest villas overlooking the Heath to the south. As a social engineering experiment it was a failure – the area has remained a thoroughly middle-class ghetto – but as a blueprint for suburban estates it has been enormously influential.
The suburb’s formal entrance is the striking Arts and Crafts gateway of shops and flats on Finchley Road. From here, ivy-strewn houses, each with its own garden encased in privet, yew and beech hedges, fan out eastwards along tree-lined avenues towards Central Square, laid out by Edwin Lutyens in a neo-Georgian style he dubbed “Wren-aissance”. (Pubs, shops, cinemas and all commercial buildings were, and still are, excluded from the suburb.) Lutyens also designed the square’s twin churches: the Nonconformist Free Church, with an octagonal dome, and the Anglican St Jude’s-on-the-Hill with its steeply pitched roof and spire, and unusual 1920s murals. East of Central Square is the Lutyens-designed Institute, with its clock tower, now occupied by an education centre and school.
Golders Green Crematorium
Hoop Lane • Daily: summer 9am–6pm; winter 4pm • 020 8455 2374 • _test777 Golders Green
The Golders Green Crematorium is where over three hundred thousand Londoners have been cremated since 1902. More famous names have been scattered over the unromantically named Dispersal Area than have been buried at any single London graveyard: Boris Anrep, Enid Blyton, Seán O’Casey, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, H.G. Wells, Kathleen Ferrier, Joe Orton, Don Revie, Peter Sellers, Peggy Ashcroft, Joyce Grenfell, Sid James, Marc Bolan, Keith Moon, Bram Stoker and Prajadhipok, the former King of Thailand; Neville Chamberlain, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James and T.S. Eliot were cremated here, but their ashes lie elsewhere. Finding a particular memorial plaque among the serene red-brick chapels and arcades is no easy task, so it’s best to enquire at the office in the main courtyard. The Ernst George Columbarium is where you’ll find the ashes of Anna Pavlova; Freud and his wife Martha are contained within one of Freud’s favourite Greek red-figure vases in an adjacent room, with their daughter Anna in her own urn close by.
Golders Green Jewish Cemetery
Hoop Lane • Daily except Sat 8.30am–5pm or dusk • _test777 Golders Green
The Jewish Cemetery was founded in 1895 before the area was built up. The eastern section, to your right, is for Orthodox Sephardic Jews, whose tombs are traditionally laid flat with the deceased’s feet pointing towards Jerusalem. To the left are the upright headstones of Reform Jews, including the great cellist Jacqueline du Pré, and Lord Hore-Belisha, Minister of Transport in the 1930s, who gave his name to “Belisha beacons” (the yellow flashing globes at zebra crossings for pedestrians).
Hendon: the RAF Museum
Grahame Park Way • Daily 10am–6pm; Grahame-White Factory closed
noon–1.30pm • Free • 020 8205 2266, rafmuseum.org.uk • _test777 Colindale
One of the world’s most impressive collections of historic military aircraft is lodged at the RAF Museum, in the former Hendon Aerodrome. The most obvious place to start is in the Historic Hangars, dominated by a vast 1920s Southampton reconnaissance flying boat. Be sure to check out the Hoverfly, the first really effective helicopter, and, of course, the most famous British plane of all time, the Spitfire. By the exit is a Harrier jump jet, the world’s first vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, labelled with a text extolling its role in the Falklands War. Those with children should head for the hands-on Aeronauts gallery, which teaches the basic principles of flight and airplane construction.
The most chilling section is the adjacent Bomber Hall, where you’re greeted by a colossal Lancaster bomber, similar to those used in Operation Chastise, the mission carried out by Squadron 617 (and immortalized in the film The Dambusters), about which there’s a short documentary. To the museum’s credit, the assessment of Bomber Command’s wartime policy of blanket-bombing gives both sides of the argument. The video of the “precision bombing” conducted during the 1991 Gulf War is given rather less even-handed treatment. Two other exhibits deserve special mention: the crumbling carcass of a Halifax bomber, recovered from the bottom of a Norwegian fjord, and the clinically white Valiant, the first British aircraft to carry thermonuclear bombs.
The outbuildings
If you’ve still got time and energy, there are several more hangars across the courtyard. Closest to hand is Milestones of Flight, where there’s a century’s worth of aircraft from an early airship gondola to the state-of-the-art Eurofighter Typhoon. The Grahame-White Factory is the UK’s first aircraft factory, purpose-built in Hendon in 1917, and now used to display the oldest aircraft including a Sopwith Triplane and a flimsy Hanriot fighter, both from World War I. Finally, there’s the Battle of Britain Hall, which contains a huge Sunderland flying boat, a V-1 flying bomb and a V-2 rocket. The main event though, is Our Finest Hour, an unashamedly jingoistic fifteen-minute audiovisual on the aerial battle between the RAF and the Luftwaffe during the autumn of 1940.
Neasden: the Swaminarayan temple
The lotus blooms in splendour, but its roots lie in the dirt.
105-119 Brentfield Rd • Daily 9am–6pm • Temple, public tours and audioguides free;
Understanding Hinduism £2 • 020 8965 2651, mandir.org • _test777 Neasden
One of the most remarkable buildings in London lies just off the busy North Circular, in the glum suburb of Neasden. Rising majestically above the dismal interwar housing like a mirage, the Shri Swaminarayan mandir is a traditional Hindu temple topped with domes and shikharas, erected in 1995 in a style and scale unseen outside of India for over a millennium. The building’s vital statistics are incredible: 3000 tons of Bulgarian limestone and 2000 tons of Carrara marble were shipped out to India, carved by over 1500 sculptors, and then shipped back to London and assembled in a matter of weeks. Even more surprising is the fact that Lord Swaminarayan (1781–1830), to whom the temple is dedicated, is a relatively obscure and very recent Hindu deity. There are no more than ten thousand followers in Britain, mostly from Gujarat, and no more than a million worldwide.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP CAMDEN HIGH STREET; SWAMINARAYAN TEMPLE; LITTLE VENICE
The Mandir (temple)
To reach the temple, you must enter through the adjacent Haveli, or cultural complex, with its carved wooden portico and balcony, and twin covered, carpeted courtyards. Shoes are the only thing that are sexually segregated inside the temple, so, having placed yours in the appropriate alcove, you can then proceed to the Mandir. The temple is carved entirely out of Carrara marble, with every possible surface transformed into a honeycomb of arabesques, flowers and seated gods. Intricate pillars are decorated with figures of gods and goddesses, while on three sides are alcoves sheltering serene life-sized Murti (idols), garish figures in resplendent clothes representing Rama, Sita, Ganesh the elephant god, Hanuman the monkey god and Shri Swaminarayan himself. The Murti are only periodically on display (9–11am, 11.45am–12.15pm & 4–6pm).
Understanding Hinduism
Beneath the mandir, an exhibition explains Hinduism’s basic tenets through dioramas, extols the virtues of vegetarianism and details the life of Lord Swaminarayan, who became a yogi at the age of 11, and stood naked on one leg for three months amid snowstorms and “torturing weather”. There’s also a short video about the building’s history.