Hampstead Heath

It’s another one of those open spaces in London that I’ve been meaning to visit “sometime” for years. With Primrose Hill under my belt, I’m looking forward to now seeing the view from Parliament Hill.

Went to Hampstead Heath yesterday with Mary for a Bank Holiday jaunt. Had lunch at the fancy pun in Hampstead then nice walk through the woods. Things were rather spoilt when we witnessed an incident involving a dog stuck swimming in one of the lakes. The poor thing could not figure out how to get out of the lake and it’s owners were completely useless idiots. Worryingly the dog started to get attacked by the swans, we did not stick around to see how things ended as it was rather distressing.

On the way back we stopped for tea and cake and were engaged in a weird conversation by some guy sitting next to us.

I went to see the massive sculpture of The Writer by Giancarlo Neri thinking…well its 9m tall so I should be able to find it!! i had no idea how vast n beautiful the heath is! …and the view from parliament hill … i would give an arm and a leg to have the opportunity to witness that everyday! seems a pity that most of the people that get to live in the £1M houses, don’t have the opportunity to enjoy it! the park in the daytime is full of their au pairs! hamjpstead is lovely too …its like a little village in the middle of the city. I want to go again!

9 October 1995

Yesterday I went up to Hampstead Heath which is a huge park a bit north of here [Queen’s Park area] but still well within London. If you had a car, it would only take 10 minutes to drive there, but it is quite a bit longer on the buses or taking the underground, because they seem to go everywhere else first and there is no direct, straight line between Queen’s Park and Hampstead. I left midmorning and what with walking to bus stops and taking busses and trains, it was close to noon when I arrived at the village (London is really just many old villages that have all become joined together). I set off walking down the Spaniard’s Road and then went into the heath, intending to follow the paths that were drawn in dotted lines on my map and as a destination, to head toward Kenwood House. Unfortunately, the dotted lines didn’t seem to correspond in any recognizable way to the paths I was following on the ground and I quickly became ‘lost’, following first one and then another, trying to find the ponds that were noted and not knowing if this one was that one. Never mind, it was a beautiful place to ramble and there were lots of people doing the same, with kids and dogs. Most of the dogs were not on leashes in the areas of the park that didn’t have things for people to do in them, like pools or benches to sit on, you know. And they seemed very well behaved, for dogs on the loose with other dogs about. I finally found Kenwood House but then I really got turned around and ended up on the far side of the heath and had to walk around on the village roads to get back to the Tube station.

7 July 1996

[This time, I checked the map and figured I could walk to HH faster and I was right. This time, I was going on a “London Walk”.]

I left the house at 9:10am, running a bit late for the schedule I had set myself but figuring it could only take around 40 minutes to walk to Hampstead. I forgot that the distance includes a vertical rise of 500 feet and I got there right at 10am, sweating freely in spite of the cold.

We walked around the village streets and only saw where famous people used to live, not where some live now. One of the places we saw is called “The Admiral’s House” because an admiral used to live there. He was known for firing off real cannon he kept on the roof and as our guide talked, it sounded just like the Admiral in Mary Poppins, and sure enough, that’s where that character came from. We saw the house where Daphne DuMaurier grew up and wrote her first books. Also James Barrie lived in Hampstead too – he wrote Peter Pan. And ‘Ham’ means farm or even home and stead means place so Hampstead just means farm place. There has been a village recorded there since 900AD.

My cousin Charlie dropped me off at Hampstead Heath so I could get a more natural view of London. I thought this was pretty close to his house in Golders Green, so I’m a little confused by it’s placement in Camden.