  HAMP IT UP
A Guide to Hampstead (extracts from an article originally published in The New York Times) This article first appeared in The New York Times, Sophisticated Traveler, March 1, 1998 To
listen to some Londoners talk, Hampstead, in the northwest corner of
the city, deserves to be described entirely in italicized adjectives,
each as double-edged and cutting as a dagger. Posh, trendy, snobbish,
twee -- they sneer at this leafy, upscale neighborhood that has managed
to preserve its village-y atmosphere a century after being swallowed by
the surrounding metropolis. Crowded with cute shops, French cafes,
Italian espresso bars, Hungarian bakeries and Arab teahouses, populated
by A-list celebrities and represented in Parliament by the actress
Glenda Jackson, Hampstead has come to be viewed as a precinct of
preening yuppies, house-proud toffs and politically correct kooks.
Recently, The Independent, a serious Labor-supporting
broadsheet, ran a front-page article about rich Hampstead residents who
buy tiger and lion manure from the London Zoo, then spread it over
their lawns. Not that they believe jungle beasts produce the best
fertilizer. No, their high-minded purpose, The Independent claimed, is to prevent foxes from burrowing in their gardens. The scent
of predatory cats supposedly protects the property of enlightened folks
who refuse to resort to traps, poisons or small-caliber pistols.
As a resident, I've taken my share of ribbing about Hampstead's reputation for designer-label living. But I've nevertheless noticed that no matter how much fun gets poked at the place, hordes of day-trippers, battalions of tourists from all over the globe and packs of picnickers, birders and hikers in sensible shoes still pour through its streets whenever the weather permits. And given the British climate, the weather is deemed to permit everything from outdoor dining to al fresco romance on the Heath whenever rain doesn't fall like drill bits or snow hasn't accumulated ankle deep. In
fact, Hampstead has for eons attracted people seeking refuge,
salubrious air, medicinal waters and spiritual solace. The Domesday
Book refers to the community as dating from A.D. 986, when Ethelred the
Unready bequeathed a plot of land for a manor or homestead (ergo
Hampstead) to the monks of Westminster. But if the HeathInformationCenter is to be believed, the monks were latecomers; mesolithic
hunter-gatherers roamed the area 8,000 years earlier. Housed at the
foot of Parliament Hill, the InformationCenter takes pains to stress that stories about naked savages are a myth. The
first settlers modestly cloaked themselves in animal skins -- which is
more than can be said of many who now frequent the Heath and its ponds
on summer days.
Thanks to the InformationCenter's
calendar, I learned that Londoners have long had a habit of fleeing to
Hampstead whenever they felt threatened by natural disasters or
man-made catastrophes. In the 14th century, they fled the fetid lanes
of downtown for fear of the Black Death. In 1666, they took shelter
here from the Great Fire. At the end of the 17th century, somebody
discovered -- or decided -- that the local water had healing
properties, and Hampstead flourished as a spa. Dotted with wells and
windmills, the village offered abundant water not just for drinking and
bathing but for laundresses who spread drying linen over shrubs on the
hills. Seen from the lowlands along the Thames, Hampstead, the city's highest point, was said to look perpetually snowcapped.
By
the 19th century, the Heath and environs had been immortalized by
landscape painters, such as Constable, and poets, such as Leigh Hunt,
Shelley, Byron and Keats. Many creative souls came seeking recuperation
as well as artistic inspiration, and an illustrious litany of
consumptives -- Robert Louis Stevenson, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine
Mansfield and George Orwell -- settled near places whose names -- Well
Walk, the Vale of Health -- sound restorative.
Although London annexed the village in 1888, Hampstead maintained its character and its
enduring appeal as a bucolic playground, an escape from urban
grittiness. No matter how swank the shops, regardless of how expensive
the real estate, the Heath's nearly 800 acres of open land remained accessible to anyone who could afford a tube or
bus ticket. To this day, the best things about the place are free --
the vistas from Whitestone Pond and Jack Straw's Castle, the lush
labyrinths of greenery, the children's playgrounds, the deer park and
Sunday afternoon concerts on Golders Hill, the miles of mown grass for
sunbathing, lollygagging and ball games.
At
half a dozen ponds, fishermen stare at the reflections of their poles
in tea-dark water. They swear the ponds teem with monstrous carp and
pike. I've never seen anyone catch a fish, but I did once watch a
hyperkinetic kid land a large crayfish. Three ponds permit swimming
and, as if by royal decree from Queen Victoria,
these have been designated the Mixed Bathing Pond, the Highgate Men's
Bathing Pond and the Kenwood Ladies' Pond. In popular parlance, they're
known as the straight, gay and lesbian ponds -- except in winter when
the straight and lesbian ponds close, and the gay one stays open for
any maniac, regardless of sexual affiliation, who cares to crack the
ice and take the plunge. Alwyn, a muscular lifeguard with a crab
tattooed on his shoulder, assured me the water in all three ponds is
safe and cleaner than the soup that laps the English seaside.
In
addition to hiking and biking trails, the Heath has cricket, soccer,
rugby and field hockey pitches, a bowling green, a putting green, 14
hard tennis courts and 2 grass courts, an eight-lane running track and
an equestrian circuit. On windy days, kite flyers congregate on
Parliament Hill and launch elaborate contraptions that remind me not at
all of the fragile paper and balsa wood craft of my childhood. Three
times a year, the Heath holds what it calls ''traditional fairs,''
complete with greasy sausages, hopeless games of chance and
tummy-tossing rides.
After
an appetite-building, thirst-stimulating day on the Heath, droves of
visitors ramble into the village, through cobbled alleys, narrow lanes
and pint-size courtyards. They throng the outdoor tables at Cafe Rouge,
Al Casbah and Graffiti. They queue up at the Creperie de Hampstead,
then hunker down on curbs and nosh on the sweet or savory delicacies.
Those with traditional English tastes frequent the Coffee Cup, a
holdover from an era when the High Street hadn't gone upmarket. There
they tuck into plates of bacon, eggs, baked beans and fried bread. For
plebeian palates, McDonald's dishes up hamburgers, but diners who yearn
for Greek, Indian, Chinese, Arab and Mexican cuisine won't go hungry in
Hampstead.
Nor
will the dry go unslaked. Almost every block boasts its own pub, and
while they all serve much the same drink and grub, each professes to
have a unique ambiance, a different decibel level, a distinctive
density of cigarette smoke and an identifiable pheromone. I'll accept
that on faith and simply observe that my favorites are the Holly Bush
Tavern and the Flask, which Samuel Richardson described in his
18th-century novel ''Clarissa'' as ''a place where second-rate persons
are to be found, often in a swinish condition.''
This
isn't to say that visitors who crave intellectual or emotional uplift
will be unrewarded. For its modest size, Hampstead has immoderate
cultural blessings. Keats's House is open to the public, and in its
garden stands a plaque in place of the plum tree under which the poet
allegedly composed ''Ode to a Nightingale.'' From that spot, a short
walk in any direction leads to the ancestral home, temporary dwelling,
deathbed or psychiatrist's couch of one celebrated resident or another.
Their names, commemorated by plaques, read like a compendium of
contemporary civilization: William Blake, John Galsworthy, Sir Julian
Huxley, Oscar Kokoschka, Piet Mondrian, Beatrice Webb, Anna Pavlova,
even Sigmund Freud. You can visit the house where the founder of
psychotherapy spent the last year of his life, and the great man's
life-size statue broods over the stalled traffic on Fitzjohn's Avenue.
During
World War II, Charles de Gaulle passed his exile at 99 Frognal, a
street whose name means ''place of the frogs,'' a reference to the
original swampy terrain that preceded suburban development. Next door,
there's a plaque to another exile, the only American who appears to
have been honored by Hampstead. At 103 Frognal, Donald Ogden Stewart,
humorist, playwright and Hollywood scriptwriter, settled for several decades after being blacklisted during the McCarthy era.
As
befits a hamlet with a rich literary history, Hampstead bristles with
bookstores, book clubs, bookish lectures and a regular series of
readings by authors. Waterstone's is a regular stop on the book-signing
circuit. Nearby, there are secondhand stalls for out-of-print editions
and the Oxfam charity shop, where journalists unload their galleys and
review copies.
One of the town's top attractions, as the old joke goes, is a place people are dying to get into. But the cemetery at St. John'sChurch has precious little space left. In the Who's Who of those already
buried there, John Constable, George and Gerald du Maurier, Hugh
Gaitskell and Kay Kendall feature prominently. Many of the other
tombstones, etched with biblical inscriptions, adorned by iconic
sculpture and furred with moss and lichen merit meditative study. I
gravitate toward grave sites swarmed over by blackberry vines that look
thorny and forbidding all winter, then turn sweetly seductive with
fruit in summer.
Just
around the corner, on Admiral's Walk, a house once owned by a dotty
naval officer has a roof that resembles the quarter-deck of a ship.
Though the builder was a lieutenant, the sprawling white place is known
as the Admiral's House. If its architecture weren't enough to single it
out, it provided backdrops for ''Mary Poppins'' and attracts film buffs
who gape at it as if expecting Julie Andrews to sail overhead pulled by
an umbrella. Fenton
House (1693) is Hampstead's oldest surviving mansion. Now owned by the
National Trust, it has a handsome collection of antique furniture,
porcelain and musical instruments. Behind its fence of wrought-iron
spears tipped with gold, there's a perfectly manicured garden with
pollarded trees and geometrically shaped shrubs. Visitors are free to
stroll the grounds or rest on the benches of this fragrant Eden.
Another eccentric house, this one the setting for scenes from ''One Hundred and One Dalmatians,'' stands on East Heath Road.
A gothic pile of rocks, it has huge windows that reflect the forest
across the street. Owned by the pop star Boy George, it draws great
drifts of his fans who have defaced the brick fence with their names,
addresses and pensees.
Amid
the pedestrians who jostle along Hampstead's streets, there are, it
must be admitted, a number who care not for beauty nor art. They flock
here to see and be seen, to spot a celebrity or to be mistaken for one.
Sporting studs, hoops and jewels in every conceivable place, tricked
out in leather, Lycra and stacked-sole shoes, they swan along looking
so famous themselves it's difficult to guess what would set them apart
from the stars who are said to reside behind every Georgian facade.
Rumor has it that Sting and Jeremy Irons have moved away, but that
Peter O'Toole eats in the same restaurant every Sunday with David Soul
and Martin Bell. Emma Thompson has stayed on without Kenneth Branagh,
and one of the Spice Girls and Steven Spielberg are supposed to be
house hunting -- not together, I hasten to add.
I've
enjoyed watching John le Carre walk his whippet on the Heath, delighted
in looking at Doris Lessing read a tabloid in a cafe and been dazzled
by the 60's rock star Marianne Faithfull eating at Ed's Easy Diner. But
basically I subscribe to the thesis propounded in my presence by a
crusty old Texan who observed that ''writers and artists and actors are
like horse manure. If you heap them up in one spot they stink. If you
spread them around a big field, they make pretty flowers grow.''
By
that measuring stick, Hampstead has just enough, and not one too many,
literati or glitterati, and they make flowers grow everywhere. In
baronial gardens, on postage stamp front lawns, spilling from window
boxes and unscrolling from baskets, something blooms here in every
season, even during the dead of winter. Off Heath Street, in the whitewashed confines of Golden Court, perennials grow in giant pots. Down Streatley Place, the road gives way to a staircase, then turns into a footpath at Mansfield Place.
The walls of cottages press close; nothing is more than a handspan
apart; and the silvery branches of fig trees form a vault over the
sidewalk. In spring and summer, hollyhocks and fuchsias, forsythia,
apple and cherry blossoms blaze in the sun or drink in the rain.
Hampstead's architecture appears to have grown as organically as the foliage, and seems to compete with it in effusiveness. On certain streets, each door is a different bright color -- lipstick red, royal green, della Robbia blue. On others, houses are painted in pastels that call to mind the Mediterranean. And, in a miracle every bit as impressive as the evolution of a bulb into a blossom, buildings here are in a constant state of transformation. Bathhouses from the old spas have become condos; guest and servant quarters have metamorphosed into rental flats; gatehouses, garages, deconsecrated churches, towers, stables, follies and conservatories do duty as principal dwellings. At first, I myself lived on the top floorof a former vicarage whose previous tenant had robbed a bank and hid the loot in the cupola. I kept searching for treasure that the police might have overlooked, but found nothing in the eaves except feathers and a few dead pigeons. Now I rent a renovated abattoir with an exposed brick kitchen, a beamed living room ceiling and a working fireplace. Because my address has the word Mews in it, a neighbor remarked that my name suggests my ancestors hail from just such a narrow back lane and that I should feel at home in Hampstead. I do. — Michael Mewshaw
 
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